


clean slate

by Damkianna



Category: Dark Matter (TV)
Genre: Aftermath, Amnesia, Complicated Relationships, Confrontations, Identity Reveal, Kissing, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Pining, Post-Canon, Rescue Missions, Undercover as Married
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:20:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27064030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Damkianna/pseuds/Damkianna
Summary: "Hey," he made himself say, and smiled wide, because if he wasn't at least halfway charming then he wouldn't have managed to get this guy in bed with him. "So, don't take this the wrong way or anything, but I have absolutely no idea who you are."
Relationships: Six | Griffin Jones/Three | Marcus Boone
Comments: 13
Kudos: 13
Collections: Fic In A Box





	clean slate

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cherryontop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherryontop/gifts).



> You had so many fantastic prompts and trope suggestions, cherryontop, and I couldn't resist combining a couple of them—amnesia, marriage, two great tastes that (hopefully) taste great together! :D I hope very much you enjoy this, and that you've had a wonderful FIAB.
> 
> Due to the amnesia and the scenario in which it occurs, Three and Six are not calling themselves Three and Six for a big chunk of this fic! It should be apparent pretty quickly which one of them is which, though, and this is Three/Six throughout even when neither of them know that's what it is. YAY AMNESIA. I took certain cues for some post-canon elements from the "virtual season" episode descriptions Mallozzi's posted on his blog, but you do NOT need to have read those for this story to make sense, I promise; the plot, such as it is, leans entirely on canonical stuff from S3.

He woke up, and he didn't know where he was.

It didn't scare him, not at first. That happened, right? Sometimes that happened. Sometimes you weren't totally sure where you'd fallen asleep when you started to wake up. That wasn't a bad thing. Just meant you'd slept deep, that was all.

Besides, wherever this was, there was a bed underneath him, and it was warm, and he was still three-quarters asleep. He felt clean, and nothing hurt, and nothing smelled bad. He was, dimly, pretty confident there were worse ways to come around.

He stretched a little just to enjoy the sensation, shifting against the sheets—which, there were sheets, and they felt nice. That was a good sign, too. He sighed a little against the pillow and straightened his legs, curled his toes—

His eyes snapped open.

He was awake, all the way. He was awake all the way, and there was someone in bed with him, and he still didn't know where he was.

Shit.

He swallowed, jaw tight, and rolled over.

Okay, well, at least he had good taste. This guy was seriously hot—built, massive fucking shoulders, a mouth that made him want to touch it. Asleep, except his brow was just starting to furrow a little.

But there was nothing familiar about that face. He couldn't dig up a name, couldn't lay hands on even the barest flicker of a memory. Had he been _that_ drunk? He must have been; except he couldn't help thinking that if he had been, he should have felt a lot worse right now than he did. His head was a little weird, maybe. Fuzzy, cottonballed. But it didn't hurt, and he didn't feel sick, and his mouth tasted regular-sleep-bad, not week-old-space-trash-bad.

Still. Drunk or not, there was no good way to tell last night's fuck you didn't remember them.

He braced himself, and waited. The guy shifted, wet his lips, blinked steady dark eyes.

"Hey," he made himself say, and smiled wide, because if he wasn't at least halfway charming then he wouldn't have managed to get this guy in bed with him. "So, don't take this the wrong way or anything, but I have absolutely no idea who you are."

The guy blinked again. His brow was furrowing harder, his eyes sharpening as he woke up for real.

And—

Well, fuck.

_Fuck._

"In fact," he continued, a little unsteadily, "I. I don't know who _I_ am, either. Which is a lot worse. Right? Doesn't that seem worse?"

 _Now_ he felt sick. His stomach rolled; the room swayed around him unhelpfully. He couldn't—he couldn't remember _anything_. Not last night, not last week, not last year. He couldn't remember his own goddamn name.

For a second, he thought, shit, what the hell had this guy done to him?

But that didn't make much sense. Did it? Why fuck a dude, give him amnesia, and then stick around the next morning to deal with the freakout?

Unless you wanted to watch the show—but this guy didn't seem to be enjoying what he was seeing. He just frowned, and sat up a little, and reached for him, spread out one big steady hand over his shoulder. "Breathe," the guy said, and his voice was low, gentle, gravelly with the remains of sleep.

He tried to do it. He tried to breathe. It sort of worked. He could feel a weird hysterical urge to laugh bubbling up from somewhere in his chest, because it was that or scream; he fumbled a hand up and closed it around the guy's wrist, dug his teeth into his lip, and what there was of the laugh made it out as a weird strained chuckle.

"Probably not how you figured this morning-after was going to go, huh?" he managed, after a minute.

The guy was quiet for a second. "I don't know about that," he said, and there was something that was wry about it and shouldn't have been.

"You mean you literally don't know, don't you?"

Shot in the dark, but it struck home: the guy grimaced a little, jaw tight. "I'd tell you your name if I knew it. But I can't even tell you mine."

Great. Fantastic. It might have felt better to know he wasn't alone, that this guy had lost his memory too—except what the hell kind of sense did that make? That wasn't just a head injury, a clot in your brain, an accident. Both of them, lying here in the same bed peacefully asleep, wiped clean? No fucking way.

What had they _done_ last night? Drugs? Was this a bad trip? If it was, he hoped it would hurry the fuck up and wear off already—

"Okay," he said aloud. "So." He paused, and rubbed a hand over his face. "Fuck."

The guy's hand tightened on his shoulder, firm, anchoring. "Let's take a look around," the guy said, kind of gently, even though surely he had to be freaking out at least a little somewhere behind that calm unruffled face. "There has to be something in here that can tell us who we are."

They took stock. They weren't actually naked; he had a loose white t-shirt and boxers, and the other guy was shirtless, sleep pants with a drawstring. Boring, not very helpful, and no pockets.

They looked at each other, and then at the bed, and then at the room.

It was just a bedroom. It didn't look familiar. It didn't look like anything. It wasn't _ugly_ , there wasn't anything wrong with it; neutral walls, no actual windows but a decently large imagescreen instead, showing a dim morning view of a lake, trees, clouds moving lazily through a brightening sky.

That was the only light in the room, all they had to see each other by. He levered himself out of the bed, listened to the rustle of the other guy doing the same behind him, and felt along the wall—hit a control panel, and brought the lights up just a little, not enough to make him squint but enough to actually get a real look around.

There were a couple doors, on his side of the room. Bathroom, he guessed, and a closet; and he wanted to think maybe it meant something when he opened them and discovered he'd nailed it—bathroom on the right, closet on the left—except, well. What the hell else were they going to be?

He stuck an arm in the closet, and pulled something out. Shirt. He eyed it, held it up. Fuck, okay, he'd assumed the other guy was his one-night stand, but maybe it was the other way around. Because this shirt was definitely not his size.

He swallowed hard, and put it back. It had been cold comfort to think maybe he and the other guy were in this together, at the bare minimum—that they'd both lost their memory, and they were both going to have to try to figure out who they were and how to fix it. But he'd also thought this apartment or whatever might be his; that he was the one who had the option to be nice, agree that the guy could stick around until they had some idea what the hell had happened.

But now—maybe all of this belonged to the other guy. Maybe he was nobody. Maybe the guy'd picked him up off the street and fucked him. Maybe the guy was about to tell him to fuck off, chase him out and call a bunch of fancy doctors for himself, and then—

He paused. He'd been about to shut the closet again, let the front panel slide shut over it, so he wouldn't have to acknowledge everything it might mean right away. But he'd reached in to put the shirt back first, and now he had the sleeve of another one caught around his wrist.

He followed the sleeve back up to the shoulder of the shirt with his eyes.

Huh. This one looked a little smaller.

He looked at the closet again. And this time he saw it.

The shirt he'd pulled out—that had been from the left half of the closet. It looked a lot like the shirts around it: fell to the same length, same palette of colors, around the same size. But the right half of the closet was different. Brighter. A handful of eye-searing patterns. And—

He tugged one out, a button-down that was already open except for the top button. He undid that lone button, and threw it on.

It fit him just fine. He tugged the sides together to check, and yeah, it strained just about taut if he pulled an extra inch. That was all the give it had. Definitely not made to fit the other guy.

He stared down at himself, smoothed his hands absently over the material of the shirt, and his heart was pounding.

So—

So maybe this wasn't his apartment, and it wasn't the other guy's, either. Maybe it was _theirs_.

He'd just assumed. Waking up like that, in bed with somebody he didn't recognize, somebody whose name he didn't know; last night's hookup had seemed like the natural conclusion, and he hadn't had anything to replace it with, even after they'd realized something was seriously fucking wrong.

But now he was getting the distinct impression that there was definitely more to the story.

He left the button-down on, open over the t-shirt he'd woken up in. The other guy had already headed out into the main room, so there was no reason not to back up a step and check the bathroom, now that he actually had something specific to look for.

And yeah, sure enough: there was a shower with sonic settings _and_ an actual water mode, which made for a clear giveaway in the form of two sets of towels. Not one out and one stowed away in a cabinet, not a spare set for guests or whatever. There was a bar along the wall. One set of towels was hung up neatly, evened out and squared up. And the other set was slung over it, haphazard, just short of sliding off and into a heap on the floor.

He had a sneaking feeling he knew which ones were his. Like hell could he be bothered whether his goddamn towels were wrinkled or not. And he'd only exchanged about fifteen words with the other guy, but yeah, he could see it. The other guy had been measured, thoughtful; hadn't freaked out, hadn't panicked, hadn't decided to claim the apartment was his and kick him out of it. If that guy was going to hang up a towel, then he was going to do it _right_. That fit.

That fit. And, in a weird way, it felt good. Just—being able to stand there and look at the evidence that they might really have been here after all, that this place might really be theirs. That they'd had lives, they'd left traces. And that maybe they were still at least a little bit themselves, somewhere deeper than memory.

Then he realized he was standing there thinking way too hard about a bunch of towels, and he made a face at himself and left the bathroom.

It took a second for him to talk himself into stepping outside the bedroom. He'd only spent five minutes in it, but that was five more minutes than he could ever remember spending anywhere else, and the bedroom was now the one place in literally the entire universe that felt even a little bit familiar.

But the main room had something else in its favor. It had the other guy in it.

And he was starting to think maybe the other guy was kind of important.

He went out. The other guy was seated off to one side, looking at a console, a screen; he glanced over, and then blinked and raised an eyebrow.

Right. The shirt. The shirt he hadn't bothered to take off and put back in the closet—the shirt, which was one of the patterned ones, the stupid ones. This one was covered in pineapples wearing sunglasses.

"I see you've been putting your time to good use," the guy said, real dry.

He sniffed, and lifted his chin, and ran a hand over the shirt. "I'm rediscovering myself," he said primly. And then he remembered what else had been in the closet, flushed a little and bit his mouth and said, "And, uh. Some of the shirts in there were mine, but some of them definitely weren't. If you follow me."

The guy looked at him with those steady dark eyes, and he flushed harder, hotter, feeling it all the way up in the tips of his ears. "Yeah," the guy said after a minute, quieter. "I follow you." And then he hooked a thumb at the screen next to him.

"That's you."

It was. Different clothes, collar of a jacket or something showing at the bottom of the headshot, but that was definitely the guy. And underneath, it said—

"Maximilian Breyer-Stone," he read off, skeptical.

"And that," the guy said, "is you."

He blinked, and looked at the other image, suspended on the screen alongside. And—shit, why hadn't he taken two seconds in the bathroom to actually look in the goddamn mirror? It put a cold shudder through him to think about it, about not knowing what his own fucking face looked like; but he swallowed it down, ducked a little until he could see himself in the shiny surface of the console, and—yeah, okay. Okay, that _was_ him. Cleaned up a little, sure, less wild around the eyes and no pineapples in sight, but recognizable enough.

"Ethan Breyer-Stone," he read off, and then stopped and swallowed. Looked at the guy, and then away. "Don't suppose there's any chance we're brothers."

The guy cleared his throat, and held out his hand: in the middle of his palm, there was a cool gleaming circle. A ring.

"It was on the bedside table," he murmured. "My side." He picked it up with his other hand, slid it on. Ring finger on his left.

It fit.

"Well, I guess that answers some questions." It came out thin, strained; he cleared his throat and rubbed a hand over his face, and then made himself look at—at Max. He tilted his head, and tried it out aloud: "Max, huh."

The guy—Max—raised an eyebrow, and then narrowed his eyes. "Ethan," he said, in about the same tone. Testing it, tasting it. Trying to figure out whether he could buy that it fit.

"I have to tell you, you don't quite strike me as a Max. And _Ethan_ , yikes." He made a face.

"Don't like it?" Max said.

He looked amused, now, which was frankly fucking unhelpful.

"It's just— _Ethan_. I was hoping it would be something cool, you know?" He gestured at himself, realizing too late that he was drawing attention straight back to his pineapples and their sunglasses. "Like—like Tex. Killer. Spike."

"I'm not calling you Spike," Max said, because he was a buzzkill.

"Buzzkill," Ethan said.

Max looked at him, mouth slanting. He was—he still didn't have a shirt on, and the ring stood out bright and silver against the dark skin of his hand, and when he was being stern or serious or calm it was easier to forget how fucking hot he was, but all bets were off when he was fucking _smiling_. Shit.

Ethan swallowed hard, and wished he'd thought to check his own bedside table. If there wasn't a ring in there, if it was—if Ethan Breyer-Stone had been stupid enough to throw it away, if they were separated or something, if he'd just gotten lucky managing to talk Max back into his bed last night for some ex sex, then maybe this memory-wipe bullshit was actually going to be the best thing that had ever happened to him.

He cleared his throat. "And you, uh, you figured out the password or whatever?"

Max held up a thumb. "Unlocks with a print," he said, "luckily for us."

"Handy," Ethan said. "So, what else does it say about us in there?"

The answer turned out to be: plenty.

Max had a job. A good job, which made sense considering the apartment. The planet they were on was a corporate planet, which Ethan had known without understanding why he knew it; and he also knew, the same way he'd known that doors that led off bedrooms were probably closets or bathrooms, that corporate planets sucked. They were basically just giant cities, everybody packed into high-rises like sardines. This apartment wasn't huge, but it was decent-sized, and Ethan was pretty sure that meant he and Max were paying through the nose for it.

Which they were able to do because Max _was_ corporate.

Mid-level. He wasn't a CEO, wasn't on the board of anything. But it was still—it was weird, looking at him and thinking it. It was hard to picture him in an office, doing what he was told, toeing the company line. It made something in Ethan's gut rebel, protesting; he couldn't stop poking at the idea like a loose tooth.

But according to the personal profile on the computer, it was true.

"And I'm your trophy husband, huh," Ethan said.

Max gave him that steady look. "Seems that way," he agreed, all mild.

Ethan made a considering face. "Well, damn, what a life to wake up to," he marveled. "Nice apartment, husband with a high-flying corporate job keeping me in the manner to which I'm accustomed, and—what, I laze around all day, waiting for—"

He stopped. He'd been about to end that sentence out loud the same way it ended in his head, which was to say: _waiting for my hot spouse to come home and fuck me silly_. But he couldn't quite get it out. No matter how hot Max was, he still _felt_ like a stranger Ethan had met about twenty minutes ago. They'd woken up in the same bed, they were probably married; technically speaking, they knew each other better than either of them knew anybody else in the galaxy. But under the circumstances, that didn't actually add up to much of anything. Ethan couldn't even decide whether he was trying to be careful not to piss Max off, not to come on too strong, or whether—whether the thing that made him nervous was that Max might not mind.

Because he hadn't been kidding. This was a sweet fuckin' life he'd woken up in the middle of. And maybe he didn't know a whole lot about himself, but—no way was he that lucky. There was something wrong with this picture, and it wasn't Max and his steady eyes, the way his mouth curved when he was amused, his fucking shoulders. And sooner or later, Max was going to figure that out, which Ethan wasn't particularly looking forward to.

He cleared his throat, dragged his eyes away from Max's bare chest and gestured toward the screen. "Well, anyway," he managed. "Don't suppose you're a chemist, working on some experimental—brain drugs?"

"Brain drugs," Max repeated, eyebrows up.

"I'm the trophy husband," Ethan reminded him. "You didn't marry me for my smarts."

Max snorted a breath through his nose, and shook his head a little. "No, nothing like that." He hesitated, and brought up something else, a totally different file directory that didn't seem to be organized the same way as the last. "I think—I think there is something wrong. But I'm not sure it's got anything to do with whatever happened to us."

"You think we both woke up with no memory _and_ there's something else we have to worry about?"

"I don't know," Max admitted. He opened three or four files—text files, Ethan saw, though there were some images in the same directory. "There are notes in here, dates, names. About the company I'm working for—Novina. Things I'm doing, things I'm tracking down." He paused. "I think they've done something wrong. I think I've been trying to figure out what, and I've been looking for evidence to turn over to the authorities."

Ethan stared at him. "And you _don't_ think somebody might have wiped our memories to shut you up?"

"I said I wasn't sure," Max repeated stubbornly. "Maybe, maybe not. We still don't know whether someone did this to us, or it's just—"

"An accident? Pure coincidence, that neither of us can remember anything that happened before we woke up this morning?" Ethan made a show of looking surprised, and then of peering at Max thoughtfully. "Are we sure I'm the trophy husband? Because right now I'm feeling like I didn't marry you for _your_ smarts."

Max gave him a flat look, and it shouldn't have been hot to get stared down like you were an asshole, but Ethan was pretty sure everything was hot when Max did it.

This was—this must have been how it worked, he found himself thinking. How _they_ worked. This back and forth, this push and pull; sniping at each other, but not in a bad way. Picking at each other, poking at each other, drawn steadily into each other's orbit because neither of them wanted to back off instead. This must've been how it worked, and boy, was it ever working for him.

"Either way," Max was saying, "I should call into the office. Take the day. If someone did do this to us on purpose, we shouldn't make it obvious that it worked. Maybe it'll still wear off. Twenty-four hours, thirty-six—who knows?"

Not likely, Ethan thought. But Max was right, even if Ethan wasn't going to say so: they didn't know. And the more time they had to try to figure this thing out, the better off they were going to be.

"Sure," he said aloud. "You got enough in there to bluff your way through one call?"

Max scrolled back up to the top of one file—the oldest, judging by the creation date. "We'll find out," he said.

As it turned out, the files probably had enough for Max to bluff his way through almost anything; he just needed enough time to read them, memorize them. He got through the list of people working in his office, his colleagues and assistants, his PA—Ethan got a good ten minutes out of mocking him for having a PA, which made him roll his eyes a lot.

Ethan also insisted he put a shirt on before he actually made the comm call, which made Max give him a sudden searching look.

Ethan's ears went hot. He ignored it, and gave Max a deliberately thorough onceover. "I _earned_ this view," he said.

"You woke up in the same bed with me and no idea how you got there," Max murmured, eyebrow raised.

But he put the shirt on. Ethan was willing to take the win.

The comm call itself went fine. Max took on a different tone while it was happening; mild, easygoing, but kind of—patronizing. Not impolite or anything, but condescending all the same. Maybe it had been in those notes somewhere: how he talked to his assistants when he was on the job.

Unfortunately for Ethan, that tone was _also_ kind of hot. He made a break for the bedroom after maybe a minute, because it was probably about time he found himself some actual pants. Perfect excuse to shut himself in the bathroom for a while and try to get a grip.

He just—there was still one part of him that was busy screaming and running around in a circle. He remembered to look in the mirror this time, and the face looking back at him wasn't any more familiar than Max's; was _less_ familiar than Max's, because this was the first time he'd actually gotten the chance to give it a good onceover.

And he wasn't Max, but he probably did okay for himself. He had a kind of rakish charm going for him: a smirky, slanting mouth, naturally skeptical eyebrows, relatively neat facial hair that still managed to look a little scruffy. Skin that was light, unlike Max's. Dark hair, pale eyes. Not bad. He pulled a couple faces, reached up and prodded his nose, smashed his cheeks together to make his mouth look like a fish's. It was funny, but he didn't want to laugh, because he was kind of worried it would turn into hysterical sobbing.

But he was okay, he reminded himself. He was fine. He was Ethan Breyer-Stone. He was alive; he wasn't hurt, except for the thing where he had amnesia. He had clothes, and a bed, and a nice apartment.

And he wasn't alone. That was the really important part. That was the only thing that made it feel like maybe sooner or later the knots his stomach had tied itself into were going to unravel themselves.

He wasn't alone. Max was there, and Max was just as screwed as Ethan was—Max didn't have any idea what was going on, either, and he wanted to figure it out just as badly as Ethan did, and neither of them had anybody else to turn to, but bare minimum, at least they had each other.

That mattered. There was no way it couldn't, in a world that so far was made up of one apartment, two people, and half an hour of fumbling around feeling panicky and horny by turns.

Ethan met his own eyes in the mirror. "Put some goddamn pants on, you jackass," he told himself, and then took his own advice.

* * *

For all that the morning had started off with a hell of a bang, the rest of the day passed quietly. Neither of them particularly wanted to venture out of the apartment—not when they couldn't be sure where exactly they lived, or who they might run into in the hallway who'd expect to be recognized. Max sat at the console and systematically went through every scrap of information he could make it spit out; all the notes he'd taken, all the photos, but he looked up their public profiles, too, and Novina as a company, trying to work out exactly what it was he'd been sticking his nose into.

By lunchtime, Max was starting to get pretty frustrated. It wasn't all that easy to tell, with him, but Ethan didn't have anything else to pay attention to: it was in the way he shifted his weight in his chair, the way he breathed out irritatedly through his nose.

There were sandwiches in the cold storage unit, pre-made, sealed. Ethan got them each one, and coaxed Max into leaving the console behind for ten minutes to eat, and _then_ pushed, because he might have amnesia but he wasn't stupid.

"I wrote all this down like—" Max stopped, pressing his mouth flat, and shrugged a shoulder stiffly.

"Like you'd know what the hell you were talking about when you looked at it later," Ethan filled in, as gently as he could.

Because sure: who could blame past-Max for assuming he'd remember what he'd been thinking? Who _planned ahead_ for the possibility of some kind of memory wipe?

"Even the parts that are in code, shorthand—most of it is so vague." Max shook his head. "I guess I was trying to make sure nobody would know what they were looking at, if somebody from the office got into my files somehow."

"Well, hey," Ethan said, artificially congratulatory. "It worked!"

Max looked at him flatly for a second; but his mouth moved, once and then again, and then he snorted. He ate the rest of his sandwich a little more slowly, and his shoulders had come down at least an inch from where they'd been drawn taut. And Ethan probably shouldn't have felt so accomplished, just because of that, but hell, it wasn't like he had anything else to do.

Max went stubbornly back to the console to keep working his way through it all, after lunch. For lack of a better way to waste time, Ethan had been going through everything else: their clothes, their stuff, the furniture, whatever he could find. It wasn't a lot, but it was something.

He was moving through the bedroom clockwise from the door. He'd finished up the closet, checking the pockets of all their slacks and jackets, before breaking for lunch; he'd already decided there probably wasn't anything in the cabinets under the bathroom sink that was going to help them, and he didn't even realize what that meant until he was turning away from the bathroom door and came face-to-face with the bedside table.

His side of the bed. Right.

He swallowed, and reached out, and opened the drawer.

He'd told himself it didn't matter. They didn't know each other—they weren't _really_ married, not when they only knew their own names because they'd looked them up on the computer. So Max had put his ring on. So what?

Ethan hadn't wanted to make it weird. He hadn't wanted to make himself obvious, rushing back in here and hunting for his own like it meant something. And—

And, maybe, he hadn't wanted to open the drawer and discover there was nothing in it.

But there it was after all. A ring. Silver, just like Max's. Lying there, gleaming innocently.

He reached in and picked it up, and turned it over between his fingertips.

It was weird. He was relieved, a sudden embarrassing rush, to find it there; he felt stupid, a little, for letting himself get so worked up in his head about it, worrying that he'd lost it or thrown it away, that he'd ruined this marriage he hadn't even known he had. And at the same time he felt a reflexive, contradictory impulse to—to pretend he hadn't found it, to throw it away after all. To act like it didn't mean anything to him, precisely because it was so ludicrously obvious that it did.

He huffed half a breath through his nose, and shook his head at himself. Last chance to brace himself, he thought. Maybe it was somebody else's. Maybe he and Max were divorced after all, maybe Max had remarried, maybe Ethan just hadn't changed his name; maybe whoever Max had picked as a second act had left this ring here, after a fight or something, and Ethan had come by to do a little recreational homewrecking in his spare time—

But it slid easily onto his finger, caught a little at the thickest knuckle and then went over, and settled snugly at the base. He paused, and pushed it up again; and yeah, okay, now that he was paying attention he could tell the skin was smooth there, in a band around his finger, like maybe he really did wear this ring a lot. Maybe he and Max were just careful with them. Took them off at night, to avoid losing them in the sheets—or anywhere more uncomfortable, he couldn't help thinking, and then laughed helplessly at himself, face hot.

He slid the ring back into place on his finger, and rubbed his thumb over it absently. And then he glanced back down into the drawer, and, okay, maybe that thought hadn't been too far off base. That was a hell of a lot of lube.

"Damn," he murmured aloud, and ran a hand over his face. "Ethan Breyer-Stone, you lucky bastard."

He—he must have been _used_ to this, before. This was just what Ethan Breyer-Stone's life was like. Decent planet, nice apartment, enormous bed; hot husband who actually seemed to enjoy being annoyed by him, with whom he clearly regularly made use of a hell of a lot of lube.

And obviously he knew he _was_ Ethan Breyer-Stone. But he only knew it in his head, right now. That identity didn't actually mean anything to him. He didn't _feel_ like Ethan Breyer-Stone. And all he could think was that he was keeping this; that Ethan Breyer-Stone was going to have to pry his perfect life from Ethan's cold dead hands, because there was no way Ethan was going to give it back to him, whenever he showed up to collect it.

Having the ring on made him more cautious instead of less, for reasons he didn't totally understand and wasn't interested in thinking about very hard.

But it was the smart thing to do, he told himself. This was everything he had in the world, at least as far as he knew—this place, and Max. He apparently didn't even have a job he needed to study up for. If he screwed this up somehow, pissed Max off, he was both ruining Ethan Breyer-Stone's amazing life _and_ making about ten thousand things a lot harder for himself in the short term. Not worth it. Not worth it, no matter how how weirdly hyper-aware he felt of Max's presence, the way he breathed and shifted his weight and frowned absently at the console screen; no matter how unhelpfully his brain kept playing back the way he'd woken up, feet against Max's, all Max's broad shirtless warmth mere inches away—

Not worth it.

So he kept quiet, and he tried not to be a pain. By evening, Max was squinting and rubbing his temples; Ethan got him a glass of water, a capsule from the bathroom that was apparently meant for headaches. He made dinner the same way he'd made lunch, pulling out a couple pre-prepared sandwiches, but Max smiled at him for it like it had been actual work, like he'd done something meaningfully nice.

Max told him about the stuff he'd been reading while they ate, everything he'd learned. Apparently Max Breyer-Stone had _definitely_ been convinced there was some serious bullshit going on under the surfaces at Novina's local offices—and while the notes he'd left didn't go into much detail about what exactly that bullshit might be, he _had_ at least kept careful track of everybody who worked there, their names and photos, which ones he thought might be in on it and suspicious of him and which he had decided were clear. He also apparently had had some kind of external support, some contacts or something he'd been communicating with, but really intermittently, so the part where Max didn't know how to get in touch again right now wasn't going to be a problem for a little while.

"Not the GA?" Ethan said, and it was just supposed to be a question. He didn't know why his mouth twisted around the words like they tasted bad, why his throat was tight.

Max gave him a searching look. "No," he said slowly. "I don't think so, anyway. It didn't sound—official."

"Just concerned citizens doing their part," Ethan said, deliberately light. "How heartwarming," and that made Max purse his mouth up, but he was totally amused on the inside.

Ethan shared the stuff he'd found in turn: there hadn't been much to speak of in the pockets of their clothes, but he'd come up with a couple things that were interesting, in the back of the closet and the bedside table.

The holsters made Max's eyebrows go up pretty high, and the comm earpieces made them go up even higher.

He reached out and ran a finger along the holsters. "But no guns?" he said.

"Not that I found," Ethan said, "but that doesn't mean there aren't any." He hesitated, because Max was starting to frown a little, face grave. "Hey, look, it doesn't have to be—maybe we were worried, you know? Maybe we figured better safe than sorry, in case somebody from your office figured out what you were looking for and came after you or something."

Max kept looking at the holsters for a second; but then he looked at Ethan, and the worst frown line across his brow smoothed itself away. "Yeah," he said quietly, and man, what a weirdo he was: happier to think maybe they'd been afraid for their lives than that they'd owned guns just for the hell of it.

The earpieces were, they discovered, connected to each other. Ethan had tried to figure that out before, but it had been a little hard to test on his own; the mics were shitty enough that any noise he could have made loud enough into one at arm's length would have been audible to him whether the other one was working or not.

When they were done screwing around, Max took them both in his hands, turned them over a couple times and then stopped. "Were there any more?" he said.

"Huh?" Ethan leaned in close over his shoulder, trying to figure out why he was asking, and then saw it too. They had serial numbers, engraved real small. And they were identical ones, right up to the last handful of digits: 602-3 on one, and 602-6 on the other.

And what were the odds they'd bought a pair with serial numbers that close, but not sequential? More likely they were part of a set that _was_ sequential, except in that case they were clearly missing some numbers.

Interesting.

"Not that I found," Ethan said again, thoughtful.

And then he realized exactly how close he was, that he'd put a hand unthinkingly to Max's upper back as he'd leaned in; that if Max turned his head and looked up at Ethan right now, he'd be close enough to—

Max did turn his head, and Ethan swayed back quick, heart in his throat, eyes too wide and he knew it. They were stuck like that for a second, Ethan staring helplessly and Max gazing up at him and thoroughly unreadable.

And then Ethan cleared his throat and retreated to his side of the table, the remnants of his sandwich, and said, "Maybe it's them. Your contacts or whatever. Maybe that's how they get in touch with you, when they're in range of these things."

"In both my ears?" Max said.

Ethan swallowed half a sandwich crust earlier than he'd meant to, scraping its way down his throat, and then looked up. Max was watching him, and Ethan still couldn't begin to guess what the hell he was thinking, but he didn't look pissed, at least.

"Okay, so maybe I'm—helping you," he said, and it was stupid how good it felt to say it, to think it might be true. He'd been starting to itch a little over it, that Max had this job and this investigation and everything, was do-gooding his way through trying to clean up whatever mess Novina was making off the books, while Ethan sat around and made sandwiches and ate bonbons.

But maybe it wasn't like that. Maybe Max Breyer-Stone had trusted his husband, relied on him. Maybe Ethan Breyer-Stone _had_ had worthwhile smarts after all, not just roguish good looks.

"You are," Max said. And it was kind of hard to be sure, but Ethan thought maybe he wasn't just talking about the Breyer-Stones.

Ethan was really good about the whole sharing-a-bed thing.

He didn't wink, and he didn't load on the innuendo, and he didn't crack jokes—not many, anyway. He took a hint from Ethan Breyer-Stone, who'd gone to sleep next to his husband in a t-shirt and boxers; clearly they weren't fucking like bunnies _every_ night. Just because he couldn't remember ever having had sex before, and he'd spent what was effectively every moment of his life to date shut in this apartment with a ridiculously attractive man he was coincidentally married to, that was no reason to act like he was beyond desperate to get laid.

Yeah. Right.

The point was, he didn't push it.

Considering how they'd woken up, it would have been pointless to get weird about it and go out to the couch or something. So he didn't do that either. He washed his face, ran a sonic scrubber over his teeth, came back out into the bedroom and threw himself down with a sigh on his side of the bed—or Ethan Breyer-Stone's side, anyway. Max was still out in the main room, maybe shutting down the console for the night or something, and that was exactly how Ethan had wanted it. He was half asleep already, eyes heavy, relaxing into the mattress by degrees, by the time Max came in.

The sound of Max in the bathroom was almost as comfortable as the mattress. Ethan let his eyes fall the rest of the way shut, and by the time he dimly registered the mattress dipping beneath him, the shushing and shuffling of Max sliding between the sheets, he was practically out, not awake enough to do anything stupid or embarrass himself.

Good job, he congratulated himself vaguely, and then he was under.

* * *

When he woke up in the morning, in the dim rosy light of the artificial sunrise on the imagescreen, he was frozen for a second, waiting to discover he'd been wiped clean all over again.

But no, he understood fuzzily after a moment, that didn't make any sense. He couldn't be afraid of losing his memory again unless he remembered losing it the first time. And he definitely did.

And then he blinked, and understood where he was and what he was doing, and was frozen for a completely different reason: because he was hard, and he was pressed up against as much of Max as he could reach, and he was pretty sure there was no way in hell Max could have failed to notice, unless he'd been knocked unconscious outright.

He drew a sharp breath, skin hot and tingling, gut tight with something that was anticipation, dread, or maybe just doing its best to split the difference. He had his face pressed into the side of Max's shoulder, and he made himself lift it, and yeah, Max was awake. Max was awake and looking right back at Ethan, and his face was doing that calm unreadable thing it did but his gaze was heavy, overwhelmingly intent.

"You don't, uh," he heard himself say. "You still don't remember anything?"

"No," Max said, and his voice was deep, sleep-low, and just hearing it like that made Ethan even harder.

Ethan swallowed. "Me neither," he said. "Obviously I don't actually know, but somehow you—don't strike me as a guy who usually fucks people he met yesterday."

Max's mouth started to slant just a little, warm, amused. "We're married," he pointed out.

"Yeah, okay, fair enough," Ethan managed.

And Max smiled at him outright for that, teeth and all, and rolled over—rolled over and pinned Ethan underneath him, and shit, he was hard too. That couldn't possibly be a bad sign.

He'd done the same thing Ethan had, followed his own past self's lead: he was shirtless, back in those thin soft sleep pants, just like yesterday. Ethan had already had both hands on Max, but now it was on purpose: he slid them along the curve at the small of Max's back and then up, skimming to either side of Max's spine. Max shivered a little, and his eyes got even darker somehow. Ethan was half-expecting to be told to stop screwing around, that he'd better be willing to follow through—to have a hand guided down to where Max presumably wanted it. They didn't know each other well enough for anything else. Sure, Max also wasn't a roll-you-over-and-stick-my-dick-in kind of guy; but it wasn't like there was any way for this to actually mean anything. Maybe after they'd done it a few more times, but until then Ethan figured he knew how this was going to go. He was ready for it.

Instead, Max kissed him.

Ethan made a startled noise into Max's mouth; Max swallowed it and kissed him harder, slower, and Ethan let his eyes close, let himself fall into the rhythm of it. Obviously neither of them actually remembered having kissed anyone before, but Ethan had both dim factual knowledge of the principles and something that felt almost reflexive, muscle memory he had no context for. He knew exactly when to open his mouth for Max, how to lean up into it, how to follow Max's lead whether Max was plunging his tongue in deep or easing off, feather-light, giving them both a chance to breathe.

They did that for a while. It felt like half an hour at least before they even touched each other's dicks on purpose, and even that was—Max started off touching Ethan through his boxers, not even bothering to push them down, just palming the outline of his cock and listening to him gasp and curse.

Ethan cursed at him some more, called him a smug motherfucker, and Max grinned down at him and then pushed his thighs apart, got between them, tucked them in over his hips. Ethan was fumbling at the waist of those goddamn sleep pants when he remembered what he'd found in the bedside drawer yesterday, and then he leaned away and pushed himself up on one elbow.

"Hm?" Max said into the side of Ethan's throat, wordless inquiry.

"Just a second, just a second," Ethan said, and then his groping fingers found one of the squeeze-tubes and he grappled it out, shoved it against Max's bare smooth chest.

Max blinked down at it. And then he realized what it was—comprehension flickered visibly across his face—and looked at Ethan, hand closing over Ethan's fingers, around the tube. "Yeah?" he said quietly.

"Yeah," Ethan said, hoarse, too earnest, meaning it too much. He tried to save it, shrugged one shoulder and added, "Sure. Who better to give your surprise amnesia quasi-virginity to than your husband?"

But Max didn't laugh it off, didn't even roll his eyes. He was watching Ethan, and he reached out with his free hand and touched Ethan's face, his mouth—kissed him again, long and lingering.

He didn't go for it right away. He pulled Ethan's shirt off first, and only went for the boxers too after like five more minutes of kissing, running those broad strong hands all over Ethan's chest and waist like he wanted to make sure he didn't miss an inch.

By the time he was actually dragging Ethan's boxers down, Ethan was flushed and squirming a little, so hard his dick was curving up against his belly.

Max let go of him long enough to let him shove them the rest of the way down his legs, kick them off—by the time he was done, Max was naked, too.

And Ethan knew there were a lot of different ways to do this, so naturally Max picked the one that should have been the most boring and made it fucking earthshaking. He didn't put Ethan on his hands and knees, didn't shove him into the pillows face-down, didn't so much as slap his ass. He moved Ethan around by degrees, kissing him the whole time, until he was on his side, with Max behind him, Ethan twisting halfway back to slot their mouths together even though his back was protesting like a motherfucker.

And then he caught Ethan around the upper thigh with one hand, drew it up and slid his other hand into the space he'd just opened up, and Ethan made a frankly embarrassing noise and screwed his eyes shut, because goddamn.

He gave up on dignity around the third finger up his ass—he had _fingers up his ass_ and he could barely drag enough air into his chest, he was making harsh desperate noises every time Max moved, and fuck, that was Max's cock, that hot hard weight against him, and he _wanted_ it, he wanted it right the fuck now. Who gave a flying fuck about _dignity_?

He swore at Max, reached back and dug his nails viciously into Max's wrist, and Max just kissed the back of his shoulder, open-mouthed and obscene, and said chidingly, "Be patient," which was just—fuck him, seriously.

By the time Max was actually putting it to him, he was out of his mind with it. He could feel every inch of his body, the rasp of the sheets underneath him, the way his toes were curling up, the way the backs of his knees were fucking sweating; he could feel every inch of Max's dick, too, pressing him inexorably open, filling him to the brim. He couldn't imagine anything better, he wanted it to last forever, and at the same time if he didn't fucking come in the next thirty fucking seconds he was going to _die_.

He expressed this sentiment as coherently as he could to Max, who laughed against the nape of his neck and gripped his thigh harder, and then pushed into him in a long, slow stroke that felt like it made his hair stand on end.

When he did come, it was practically an accident. Max was starting to speed up, tensing, breath hard in Ethan's ear in a way that was distantly satisfying, and Ethan was wondering vaguely whether he could get there just like this; maybe, he thought. Maybe if he had a little bit more—a little bit more of Max's cock, or if Max just gripped his thigh a little tighter, if Max rolled them so he was on his front and pushed him down, _held_ him down—that might be enough. And then Max moved his hand, gripped Ethan low around the waist and fucked into him with a long smooth roll of his hips, and Ethan jerked at the sheer fullness of it, twisted a little in Max's grasp, and the point was that the head of his dick rubbed up against the side of Max's palm just as Max was digging his fingertips into Ethan's gut and grating out, "Come on—yes— _Ethan_ —"

And that was it, he was toast. He cried out, low and cut-off, shuddering, and Max gripped tighter to hold him still, swore against his shoulder and fumbled down to grip his dick _while he was coming_ , which made it about six times better. He was aware, distantly, that after another sudden rough half-thrust into him, Max was coming too, and that didn't hurt either: the sensation, Max's cock and the heat and the obscene messy wetness of it, and the knowledge that he'd caused it, tensing, tightening around Max the way he had.

When it was over, they lay there for a minute catching their breath, and Ethan was honestly halfway back to sleep before Max nudged him, pulled carefully out and then coaxed him up and into the bathroom.

They showered together, which was for the best because Ethan's knees felt like they belonged to a baby deer. Max put the shower in water mode before Ethan could even cajole him into it, and Ethan grinned at him and leaned in to give him an approving kiss, which somehow turned into making out luxuriously under the spray for a good fifteen minutes before they remembered what they were actually supposed to be doing in there.

"Okay, all right," Max said at last, holding Ethan off with one hand, grinning. "I thought I'd try going into the office today, at least for a while. Which means I actually have to get moving."

"Aw," Ethan said, and made an exaggerated pouting face at him; and then he let it slide away, ran his hand up Max's chest and added, "You sure?"

He'd wanted it to sound like he might as easily be asking _You sure you don't want to stay for another round?_ as _You sure it's a good idea to take the risk?_ Judging by the sudden soft look that crossed Max's face, he hadn't quite pulled it off.

"I think it's worth a try," Max said, almost gently. "I told them it was a family emergency, yesterday. I can always say it was medical, claim there was a relapse or a change in condition and bolt if I have to."

Which was fair enough.

"Okay," Ethan conceded, and if he hung off Max a little harder, leaned into him a little more, even though his legs were just about steady under him now, well, Max didn't call him on it.

Max cleaned up pretty good, even stuffed into a nice corporate suit—as if he hadn't been hot enough already, Ethan thought, but he couldn't muster any actual resentment. He checked the time and then refused unequivocally to sit down and actually eat anything; but Ethan shoved a nutrient packet into his pocket with a stern look, and made him swear up and down he'd eat lunch. And maybe—

Maybe Ethan could actually make something for him, something that wasn't a sandwich, that could be ready and waiting for him by the time he came back.

By the time he came—home.

It was half a test, letting himself use that word for it in his head. He rolled it around, squinted at it from a couple different angles, and it didn't throw him, didn't spook him. Yeah, okay. Home.

Max grinned like he knew, like he'd heard the thought, and kissed Ethan one more time, hard, before he actually left to catch a transit car. "Check the console," he said, instead of goodbye. "There's notes in there about the building, our neighbors, everything. Might help."

"Yeah, yeah, go on," Ethan said, flapping a hand at him. "I'm pretty sure I can make it eight hours without you, pal."

Which was true enough. But still, he thought, watching the door close behind Max, it was nice to know it wasn't going to be any longer than that. It was nice to know that Max would come back, that Ethan was going to get to spend all night with him; that that was how this worked, how every day could be.

Because this was his life, apparently, and he was pretty fucking glad it was.

* * *

It went on like that for a couple weeks.

They were good weeks. The two of them settled into kind of a routine. Max could fake his way around Novina's offices pretty well, as it turned out; he had a couple slipups the first few days, but he'd done a damn good job memorizing his own notes, and he didn't fuck up anything big, miss a name he should've known or forget a meeting.

He was pretty sure his past self had been right to be suspicious, which helped—Ethan made fun of him for it, but it was obvious that it really did fire him up somewhere on the inside, thinking something shady was going on and he might be able to do something about it. There were three nights in a row where they didn't fuck at all, while Max laid everything out for Ethan: some kind of secret facility or something, a project that had no official presence in any of the internal databases Max had access to, but he was feeling out the shape of it anyway in the resources it used, the negative space nobody was acknowledging.

Ethan made his way through Max's notes on his own at a slower pace than Max had. But he liked that. He liked being able to take his time, and he liked not having anything in particular he was expected to do. He could sleep as late as he wanted, eat whatever he liked; take sub-orbital tourist transit halfway around the planet and back, looking down on all the gleaming spires of the buildings or up at the dark bowl of the sky, the glitter of stars, and be home in the apartment in plenty of time to heat something up before Max arrived.

And when Max wasn't busy explaining his grand conspiracy theory to Ethan for three nights in a row, they fucked.

Not always. Not every night. They were both at least fifteen years too old for that. The thing was, though, it didn't matter. Without any personal experience to give them an idea what was normal, to set their expectations, they just—did whatever the hell they wanted, whenever they were both in the mood for it. Kissed until they fell asleep against each other, sat on the couch pressed together from shoulder to ankle watching bad vids. If only one of them was in the mood for it, he just jerked off as loudly as he felt like, which resulted in either swearing and a pillow to the face, or the other one finding himself in the mood too pretty damn quick.

It worked. It worked _great_.

The most intense part about it, at least for Ethan, wasn't even the amnesia, or the shadowy corporate schemes looming over them. He'd gotten pretty settled into the one; he couldn't remember ever being any other way, after all, and knowing it wasn't normal, that something weird had happened to him, wasn't the same as feeling it. After the first ten days, it was pretty obvious that it wasn't going to wear off, not on any halfway reasonable schedule. And the corporate stuff was creepy and interesting at the same time, kind of exciting, but—abstract. Ethan hadn't been to Max's office, and Max wasn't particularly eager for that to change. He didn't want anybody to get spooked, or to start paying more attention to Ethan than was already warranted just because he was married to Max.

So it stayed abstract. It didn't feel like a big deal. More like a thought exercise Max was putting him through, combined with your basic thriller vid plot.

The rings were the thing that felt like a big deal. The rings were the thing that hit Ethan where he lived.

After Ethan found his, they'd both worn them for a day or two. For Max, it just made sense to put his own on every day; he was going out regularly to a place where people knew him, knew he was married and were expecting to see that ring on his hand.

But Ethan couldn't decide whether it was too much or not enough. For the first week or so, he told himself it was stupid to bother keeping it on when he was alone in the apartment—when there was nobody to wear it for. Except it started to feel like a statement to go to the trouble of taking it _off_ all the time, taking it off and then putting it back _on_ before Max arrived, and who the hell was he kidding? When he was alone in the apartment, that meant nobody could see him wearing it just because he wanted to. So, really, he might as well.

He stopped taking it off. He didn't even take it off the way Ethan Breyer-Stone had taken it off, at night for safekeeping or whatever the hell he'd been doing. He wore it all the time. It felt stupidly daring, like he was laying claim to something that didn't actually belong to him: marriage vows he couldn't remember saying, feelings he couldn't plausibly be having after ten fucking days. It was irrational, but he felt like he was waiting for Max to call him on it, waiting to be asked to explain himself, even though there was no reason Max should even have noticed.

But he did.

Max still took his own ring off at night, tirelessly consistent, like he was trying to make sure to keep up all Max Breyer-Stone's habits, not just the public ones. And one morning when they'd woken up curled around each other and just kept going, started fucking, drowsy and slow, Max closed his hand around Ethan's and then stopped moving, just holding Ethan against him, reaching back to grip Ethan's thigh.

"Max?" Ethan mumbled into the nape of Max's neck, dimly confused.

And then he felt Max's thumb, two fingertips, rubbing along the curve of the ring where it crossed the back of his finger, and he tensed up and swallowed hard.

And shit, that was even stupider than keeping the ring on in the first place. Doing it could be explained away, a mistake or an accident or sheer fucking laziness; but reacting to it like that, like you'd been found out or something, made it obvious there was something to be found out for.

But Max didn't say anything, didn't ask. He shifted on Ethan's dick—fuck, fucking hell—and then he moved, leaned up on one elbow and slid a hand across the surface of the bedside table in front of him. His side of the bed: he came back with his own ring in his hand, and he put it on and then gripped Ethan's hand again. Like this, Ethan's chest to his back, their left hands were on the same side. The rings bumped, clacked a little, a dull metallic sound that shouldn't have been able to squeeze Ethan's heart so tight in his chest.

Ethan didn't say anything either. He just held Max tighter, pressed himself up against Max's back harder. He wasn't even fucking Max anymore, not really; he was just lying there, clutching Max, not moving.

Max twisted around in his arms, turned his head as far as he could—awkward fucking angle, but Ethan met him halfway anyway, kissed him. Hard and messy, mouths half open, but if Max minded, he didn't say so.

It wasn't, like, _love_. It couldn't be.

But it was something, and Max could tell already he wasn't going to be able to get rid of it anytime soon—wouldn't have been able to, even if he'd wanted to.

Then, two days after that, Max didn't come home.

Ethan tried to be reasonable about it. He tried to stay calm, to think it through: decide what kind of delay might make sense, might have a cause as straightforward as a transit breakdown; how long he should wait before it started to make sense to get _un_ reasonable about it.

And then he stood up and went to go get those holsters he'd found. They still hadn't figured out where the guns were, if they had any; but maybe he could find something to stick in them that would look like it was a gun for a minute. Or maybe he'd get lucky, and whatever had happened to Max involved at least one person with a gun Ethan could grab.

Because it might. He knew that. It was a cold weight clamped around his spine, that certainty. He wasn't sure it belonged to Ethan Breyer-Stone, to the person who'd lived this perfect life in this beautiful apartment. It didn't seem like the kind of thing that should have made sense to that guy, that if Max had gotten noticed poking around into things he shouldn't have, somebody might have decided it was worth making him disappear.

And he wasn't going to call the authorities. Telling the GA about it wouldn't do shit, would cause way more problems than it solved—that was just basic logic, he told himself, ignoring the way his gut lurched even thinking about it, the bone-deep awareness that he couldn't have put that on the table whether he thought it would help Max or not. Novina was a huge fucking corporation, they had to have all kinds of ways to influence the authorities; no way would they just let Max get rescued and turn over everything he had on them. Forget it.

Which meant this was up to Ethan.

This was up to Ethan, and he'd lose literally everything that meant anything to him if he fucked it up.

He went to Max's office first.

He'd been through everything Max had at the apartment almost as thoroughly as Max; they'd gone over the pieces together more than once, trying to put a clearer picture together, trying to understand how Novina's production lines tied into the files Max had on a dozen major political figures who had no association with Novina at all, or the rumors of some kind of alien fleet that were coming from the other side of the galaxy entirely. And if there was something in there that pointed to exactly what had happened to Max and why, then they were fucked, because Ethan had no idea what it might be.

But maybe there was a reason this had happened today. Maybe Max had found something while he was at work, had overheard or intercepted something and had been noticed doing it—something important enough that whoever was behind all this had panicked, had decided they needed to deal with him immediately. And if that was the case, then the only way Ethan was going to be able to figure out what might have happened was by checking the office.

Max wasn't the only one who had some nice fancy suits in the closet. Ethan got himself dressed up, tucked the holsters and the two comm earpieces away in an inside pocket, and left.

He hadn't been to Max's office himself, but he knew where the building was, which transit line to get on. Getting into the building was easy enough; he was a normal, respectable guy, he was visiting his husband who was working late, it was the kind of thing that probably happened all the time. He held his breath for a second, wondering whether the dude behind the reception desk was about to frown and tell him Maximilian Breyer-Stone had already left the office for the day—but he got waved through instead, which meant ... shit, he didn't know what it meant, except that there was _definitely_ something wrong. If Max had actually been staying this late voluntarily, he'd have fucking called.

Max's office was on one of the upper floors, high in the gleaming spire of the building. The elevator was so fast and silent Ethan didn't feel like he was moving at all. Because this was a giant fucking corporation and it had an image to sell, Max's "office" was about half of the whole floor, and the other half was divided up for his assistants and flunkies and whatever else. Ethan stepped out and looked around, and the first thing he noticed was some junior intern's hair—spilling out across the floor, and when he rounded the desk she was lying there, unmoving, eyes closed.

He went for her shoulder, her throat: pulse, so she wasn't dead, but she didn't wake up when he shook her. And okay, this was even wronger, because nobody should have been just sending him up here without a hitch to find some chick knocked out on the floor. This had _really_ been a rush job, and nobody had taken the time to clean up after.

On the upside, that probably meant they hadn't taken Max out until at least the late afternoon. Somebody else would have come through here if it had been longer than that, and then the jig would've been up.

So there was at least half a chance Max was still alive, Ethan thought, and then kind of wanted to throw up on the floor.

Except that wouldn't help. He took a couple deep breaths instead, made himself actually go into Max's _office_ office, and shit, it had been trashed. He swallowed, and braced himself, and started looking around. Max's screens and work console were all shut down, and even if Ethan restarted everything, he wouldn't be able to get in; he had no idea what credentials Max used, but whether it was passwords, fingerprints, or retinal scans, there was no way past it for him.

Fuck. He closed his eyes, rubbed a hand over his face. He'd been marathoning too many classic vids, probably. He'd been hoping for something, some clue, some trail to follow. A notepad where an imprint had been left behind that he could trace over, or a message Max had left for him that Novina's goons had overlooked.

But that had been stupid. Wishful thinking. If Max wasn't here, then the only other place Ethan could think of to look for him was the production facility.

Which—actually made some kind of sense, now that he thought about it. Whatever it was that was going on, the facility was right in the middle of it, Ethan knew that much. Which meant it was absolutely plausible that whoever was running this thing had access to that facility, and was keeping some part or another of it under wraps, trying to keep everyone else from figuring out what they were doing. Where better to take the guy you'd caught snooping around than someplace you were in total control of and maybe even had a secret murder basement in?

It was probably the best chance Ethan had. Worth a shot.

But how the hell was he going to get there? As if there was going to be a public transit line to some manufacturing warehouse—and even if there _was_ a company line, it was probably reserved for employees only.

Shit, he thought, jaw clenching. It was even worse than not knowing where Max was at all, to have a damn good guess and just not be able to get there—

And then, absent, running his hands furiously through his hair, he looked up, and caught sight of Maximilian Breyer-Stone's personal corporate shuttle, courtesy of Novina, berthed quietly in its dock just off the office balcony.

He had access.

He had no idea why—maybe Max had programmed him in, or maybe _Maximilian_ had, before, wanting his husband to be able to use the company car, so to speak. The point was, the shuttle took Ethan's thumbprint, took a retinal scan, and then let him in, and it even had a handy-dandy navigation map that covered Novina's holdings and property on-planet.

Novina had security, scanners, shields, because of course they did. They didn't want just anybody walking right onto the grounds of one of their largest production facilities.

But one of their own company shuttles wasn't going to set any of that shit off; that was the whole point of _having_ company shuttles, so the heavyweights with top-floor offices weren't inconvenienced by the procedures everybody else had to go through.

And Max wasn't top-floor, but he was pretty close.

Ethan sat in the shuttle with his hands clasped behind his head, barely breathing, and let the autopilot do the work—somewhere in his gut, he felt half-convinced that if he touched the controls, he'd be detected.

He wasn't. The shuttle sailed through the security shield; it registered scans being run, and let him know with a businesslike _ding!_ , but there was no followup report that they were in violation of anything, and they didn't get shot out of the sky.

The shuttle came to rest on the grounds of the production facility almost silently, which was great, and then it opened up to let Ethan out. It was evening by now, the sky dark, and for some reason Ethan found it weirdly comforting to look up through the haze of light pollution and catch one, two, three stars twinkling dimly. Like anything up there was going to be any help to him right now.

The facility's grounds were lit, consistently but intermittently; the lights were spaced far enough apart that there was room to shuffle through patches of shadow in between. And damn, this place was _big_. What were they even making here? Ethan had a vague idea that Max had thought they were trying to conceal some kind of secret production line, that some of his notes had outlined his suspicions that more energy, time, and materials were going into this place than were officially coming out. And now, just looking at it, he was starting to feel like Max had really had a point. There was probably a lot you could hide in here without anybody knowing you'd done it.

There were guards, because of course there were. Ethan crept around trying to get a good look at them, watched one yawn jaw-crackingly and try to hide it with one hand, and that was just insulting—except, wait, maybe that was actually going to help him. These guys didn't look like guys who knew somebody on the grounds was being held against his will and possibly murdered tonight. Which meant either Max wasn't here after all; or he was, but these guys weren't aware of it.

Ethan retraced his steps until he was almost all the way back at the security shield, and then started circling the place. And way, way off around the left side, there were four guards covering the exterior of one particular wing who didn't look sleepy at all. They were awake, alert, eyes roving back and forth, hands on their guns.

They, Ethan thought, knew shit was going down.

On the upside—maybe he really had found Max. On the downside, fuck. Four of them, all armed, and him without a gun.

He gritted his teeth, and went back to the last guy around a corner from them, the last guy who'd looked like a bored dude who wasn't getting paid enough to stand out here all night. That guy did not have his guard up, and that guy, it transpired, had not been expecting anybody to try to sneak up behind him, screw up, catch his eye, panic, and punch him in the gut before he could yell.

It worked out in the end. Ethan managed to tackle him to the pavement, jerk his comm out of his ear and then slam his head into the ground, and maybe he was dead or maybe he wasn't, but either way it was hard to feel too bad about it.

And he'd had _two_ guns, one at his hip and ready to go and a backup, which was great. Ethan took them, slid them into the holsters he'd strapped on and then pulled them out again, and before he even really realized what he was doing, he was—he'd flipped them in his hands, whirled them around on his fingers and caught them again.

He knew how to hold them, how to handle them. He closed his hands around the grips, tested the heft of them, and shit, it felt _good_. Like he knew how to use them; like he'd done it before.

He swallowed. Come to think of it, he probably should have felt worse about possibly breaking the guard's head open. But he didn't. And yesterday, this morning, that would have freaked him out—he'd have wanted to pretend it wasn't true. Because Max wasn't like that, Ethan knew it in his gut. And how would Max ever have ended up marrying somebody who could kill people and feel okay about it? That made no sense at all.

But right now, he decided, tightening his grip on the guns, he was grateful for it. Because he was probably going to need to shoot at least one person to get inside and find Max, and he absolutely was okay with that.

* * *

The guns were great. He _loved_ the guns.

The four guards left between him and probably-the-best-way-in were down within about ten minutes. He tricked one into coming to check out a noise, classic, and that guy had very responsibly commed his buddy to say what he was doing, so when he didn't come back, his buddy came looking for him. Easy as pie. After that, Ethan collected their guns, too—you could never have too many guns, especially when you were doing something stupid and dangerous—and shot the last two at the same time, one gun in each hand.

He hadn't known he could do that. He was learning a whole lot of stuff about himself today.

The guards had keycards, because of course they did. He dragged one over, and a keycard plus a thumbprint was enough to get him inside—Novina really loved their thumbprints. Which made sense, because Ethan was pretty sure Max had mentioned something about their having pioneered the most advanced thumbprint scanners on the market, trying to compete with Traugott's cutting-edge retinals.

Once he was inside, he had absolutely no idea which way to go. He picked hallways at random, creeping along as quietly as he could and listening hard for voices, footsteps, anything that would give him a hint as to where he should look. He'd expected to run into people inside, workers on the night shift or whatever; but this whole wing seemed to be shut down. Or maybe "shut down", officially speaking, so they could run whatever operation they were running without drawing unwanted attention.

It took him about half an hour in there, all told, to find Max.

He didn't even know exactly what it was that first tipped him off that he was getting close. A noise, quiet enough that he hadn't consciously registered it? Some indefinable change in the air?

Whatever had done it, he slowed because of it, and a second later he heard the faint but unmistakable sound of somebody getting hit somewhere that hurt: a dull, meaty impact paired with an involuntary, wordless response from behind clenched teeth.

The next door. Had to be.

It was solid; no way he could tell whether anyone was facing it before he opened it and went through. So he didn't try. He walked in, guns raised and leveled, ready.

The first thing he saw was a good half-dozen guys in suits, some already staring at him, startled, angry, and some turning around, pale and nervous, wild-eyed.

The second thing he saw was Max.

Max was in the middle of them, tied to a chair that looked like it had been hastily bolted into the floor. He was bleeding from the mouth, the nose, a split over one eye and the cheekbone on the same side. They'd been hitting him a lot. And there was something else wrong, too, a scattering of raw wounds that looked like burns. One of them must've had a gun with sear settings, the really nasty kind.

Max's eyes were half-closed, one of them because it had started to swell up and the other probably just because he wanted to check the fuck out and pretend he was somewhere else, which was fair enough. But then he blinked, once and then again, and his gaze settled on Ethan, and suddenly he was all the way there again, present, straightening up with a strained little flinch and looking—fuck, looking _worried_.

"Ethan," he rasped out. "What the hell—"

"Shut up," one of the guys in suits bit out, and hit him across the face.

Ethan shot that guy in the side, half a second later. He folded up with a shout, crumpled onto the floor and curled in on himself, and Ethan wasn't even a little bit sorry.

Half a second after that, he had the remaining five guys' guns pointed at him. Or, no, four: one of them, smarter than the rest, had put a gun to Max's head instead.

"Hi," Ethan said, and smiled, all teeth. "So, listen, I don't give a shit what you guys are doing in here, okay? Not my business. I just want to walk out of here with him in one piece. What are the chances you're going to let me do that?"

"Not great," one of them gritted out. He looked pretty stressed, veins pulsing at his temples, whites of his eyes showing all around the iris.

"Anything I can do to change that?" Ethan offered, as steady as he could get it.

"Maybe if your fucking _husband_ weren't a fucking GA officer," another one of them spat.

Ethan blinked, and looked at Max—which was stupid, because it wasn't like Max had any better idea than he did whether that was true. And sure enough, Max's mouth was twisting wryly, one of his eyebrows arching up a fraction. Suddenly Ethan had to swallow down a pointless laugh.

Because shit, maybe Max _was_ GA. Maybe that was why he had had all those goddamn notes, all those photos, compiling evidence he was going to be able to turn in to his real bosses. Maybe the holsters were his, service weapons stowed away somewhere neither of them had known to look. Maybe the comms were, too, and that was how he'd reported in to whoever was above him. Maybe Ethan Breyer-Stone would've known that, would've been ready for it; or maybe he hadn't. Maybe he'd believed his husband had quit the GA, gone corporate for real.

Maybe Maximilian Breyer-Stone had been trained to run investigations like this, had known what he was doing, had known how to be more careful than Max had been—

Or maybe Max hadn't blundered into any traps Maximilian Breyer-Stone would've avoided. Maybe he hadn't screwed up. Maybe it had just been bad luck—somebody nervous finally deciding to run a search, a background check or facial recognition or who the fuck knew what.

But as it was, Ethan knew Max had had no goddamn idea. And whatever it was these guys wanted out of him, information on the GA investigation or how much Max's bosses actually knew, it was literally impossible for Max to give it to them.

Fantastic.

"Hasn't been real cooperative so far, huh?" Ethan said aloud.

The guy who'd taken over the talking sneered. "Can't play tough forever."

Ethan made a face, contemplative. "Might agree with you there," he said, "if that were what he's doing. But he's not. Whatever it is you're asking him, he can't answer."

The guy glowered. "He will when we're done with—"

"I said 'can't', moron," Ethan said, tone pitying. "Not 'won't'."

And three of the five guys who were still standing traded quick glances, flickers of confusion crossing their faces. But the other two—they looked at each other, not anybody else, and they weren't surprised in the least.

"You," Ethan said to one of them. "You know what I'm talking about. What you did, it worked. Okay? He can't answer, because he doesn't remember. He doesn't remember anything."

"What the fuck is he talking about, Hayward?" one of the other guys snapped.

And probably-Hayward shifted his weight, swallowed and looked at his accomplice and said, "Oh, come on, what the hell are you listening to him for?"

"Hayward," the accomplice said nervously.

"Shut _up_ , Nicholson—"

"We weren't trying to wipe him!" Nicholson blurted immediately, like he was celebrating Opposite Day. "We weren't trying to wipe him. We were—our department's been working on that prototype, that memory access device. We just wanted to know what he knew. We wanted to know how far he'd gotten—"

"Jesus fucking Christ, Nicholson," Hayward spat furiously, and he brought his gun up—he was the one who'd been aiming at Max instead of Ethan—and shot Nicholson in the shoulder.

Nicholson shrieked and went down like his strings had been cut, and for a second everybody was shouting, reacting, moving, half of them toward Nicholson and half of them toward Hayward.

"You _wiped_ him?" one of them said, louder than the rest.

"Look, it didn't work the way it was supposed to," Hayward ground out. "We didn't know whether it would take. We had to wait and see. He came in, he was acting normal—we couldn't be sure." His gaze flicked to Ethan again. "You too?"

"That's right," Ethan agreed warmly. "Both of us. Whatever you did, it left fuck-all. Can't remember a thing before two weeks ago."

Hayward snorted. "Fantastic," he muttered. "We drugged you silly, but you came around anyway halfway through. Tried to fight us off. Figured we might as well try it on you, too, and keep you from remembering it had been us."

And Ethan couldn't help it anymore; he _did_ laugh at that. What a goddamn comedy of errors. And Max had been so good at going undercover as himself, they hadn't even realized they'd done it. Fuck, they must have spent those two weeks sweating themselves sick, thinking Max could identify them, might turn them in to the GA any second.

"You stupid sons of bitches," one of the other guys said, almost wonderingly. Hayward turned, mouth twisting, clearly ready to unload two weeks of near-panic in a single cathartic screaming match with his own goddamn ring of co-conspirators; and Ethan would've been happy enough to leave him to it, except Max was still tied to the chair in front of Hayward, bleeding, and Hayward didn't seem likely to just let Ethan walk over and get him—

There was a noise. All of them looked up, reflexive, but it wasn't the ceiling in here. It wasn't in the building at all. It was—overhead?

And then, suddenly, there was a shuttle.

An entire fucking shuttle, right there in the room with them. Ethan yelped and stumbled away, and so did the other guys. It had just popped into place in the space of a blink, air displaced in a soft rush, the only indication that it hadn't been there all along and just invisible or something.

"What the fuck!" somebody shouted, and then the shuttle hatch opened up and there were a bunch of people coming out, guns even bigger than Ethan's, and—

And they were pointing them at the guys in suits, not at Ethan.

Ethan gambled on the odds that they were going to keep doing it, and hurried forward. Max was bound into the chair with dark cord, knotted taut; Ethan didn't think trying to shoot it apart was going to work like it did in the vids, but he didn't want to crouch here for ten minutes trying to pick the knots apart, either.

He looked around. And one of the people who'd gotten out of the shuttle—a woman, dark-haired, grave-faced, ridiculously pretty—met his eyes and then glanced at Max. Her mouth tightened like she was pissed. And then she let go of her gun with one hand, reached down to her waist, and threw a knife at Ethan.

Not, like, _threw_ it threw it. She tossed it, that was all. Underhand, in a gentle arc, angled so Ethan was going to be able to catch it by the hilt and not the blade.

Which he did, instinctive, grabbing it out of the air. "Thanks," he said, because if she was willing to be on his side then he was perfectly happy to have her stay there. The knife was sharp, and within about twenty seconds he'd sawed through all the cords and was helping Max to his feet.

"Come on, come on," somebody else was saying—another one of the people who'd come out of the shuttle, a guy, short and squirrelly-looking. "Hurry up already. This is so stupid, I can't believe you talked me into this—"

"Pretty sure I ordered you," the woman said flatly.

"That counts as talking," the squirrelly guy said, and gestured, beckoning, at Ethan.

And on the one hand, nothing about this made any sense, Ethan had no idea who these people were, and for all he knew, this was a trap. On the other hand, he didn't exactly have a Plan B for getting him and Max out of here alive, and these people and their magic disappearing shuttle were clearly going to be able to do that. Besides, he wouldn't have recognized his own fucking mother if she'd showed up to help him right now, so, hey. Why not?

"Okay, all right, keep your hair on," he said aloud, and the squirrelly guy gave him a flat look but didn't stop motioning, hustling him and Max toward the hatch.

"Android," the woman said behind him. "Five—are you in?"

"Just about," someone said. A girlish voice, faint, tinny; it was—it was coming from Ethan's suit jacket. The inside pockets. The comms, Ethan realized. These were the people on the other end of the comms, the people who maybe had the rest of the set.

That was probably a good thing. Right?

"When you've issued the command, confirm," the woman said coolly. "We've got three and six," which—were coordinates, maybe? Some kind of designation for this wing of the facility? Ethan had no idea. "We'll be ready to blink out on your mark."

"Okay," said the girlish voice, after about another four seconds. "Here goes nothing."

Which was exactly what it seemed to be, at first: nothing happened, or at least nothing Ethan noticed. He had an arm around Max, and they were up the ramp, almost inside the shuttle hatch. "Okay?" he said, low, into Max's ear; the squirelly guy gave him a narrow-eyed sidelong look for it, which he ignored.

"I'll live," Max said hoarsely, which wasn't exactly an answer, and Ethan gave him the hairy eyeball so he'd know Ethan hadn't missed the evasion.

And then, suddenly, there was light illuminating Max's face, light coming from somewhere behind Ethan. He turned to look, startled, and it was—he hadn't even really looked at the room they were in, hadn't looked at much of anything once he'd realized Max was in here. Besides, it had been dim, a handful of overhead lights shining down on Max and the guys in suits, and everything else fading out into shadow.

But this room was _huge_. It wasn't even really a room, it was an entire fucking warehouse. And it was filled, floor to ceiling, with racks of pods. Pods with people in them.

The edges and insides of each of the pods had lit up blue-white. Because, Ethan thought, whatever—whatever the owner of the girlish voice, an android or whoever—had done had brought them online, activated them or something. That was where the sudden new light falling on Max's face, on all of them, had come from.

The people inside were just lying in there, eyes closed, like they were asleep. But the pods were—there were dozens, _hundreds_. They went on and on and on, seemingly endless rows of them lighting up one at a time.

"What the _hell_ ," Ethan said, hushed.

"What are you doing?" one of the guys who wasn't Hayward yelped at the woman, eyes round.

"I'm waking them up," she said grimly. "I'm waking them up, and I'm giving them a choice. They aren't going to be your puppets, and they aren't going to be hosts for those _things_."

"No," another one of them kind of moaned. "No, oh, god, you don't understand. You can't do this. Look, they need something, but they don't care who. They won't take _us_ if we just give them another option—"

The woman looked at him almost pityingly. "Did Rook tell you that?"

"All existing instruction packets have been deleted," the girlish voice said over the comms, with open satisfaction. "I did give them a data packet with everything we've got so far on the aliens. So if they do decide to make the wrong choice, at least they're going into it with their eyes open."

"So it _did_ have something to do with that invasion story we kept hearing," Max murmured, half into Ethan's shoulder.

"Sounds like it," Ethan agreed, looking at him—wincing, helpless, because there was still blood all over Max's face, and Ethan reached up and touched the least-bloody part he could see, smoothed a thumb soothingly over the skin just in front of Max's ear. "Hey, we'll be out of here in a minute, okay? I don't know where the hell we'll be going once we are," he added, wry, "but we'll be out of here."

"Works for me, believe me," Max said, grimacing, reaching up to wipe at the blood that was actively dripping from his chin.

When Ethan looked away again, the woman had turned her head to stare at him, with the faintest furrow between her brows.

One of the guys who wasn't Hayward—not the same one who'd been talking to her—got the bright idea to try to rush her; she turned back toward them and shot him even though she couldn't have had time to actually aim, and he crumpled to the floor and didn't move.

"And we were right," the girlish voice added, almost absently. "This facility's at the center of their network. There are uplinks to all the synthetics they've already put into the field. I'm doing the same thing for them—it'll take a little longer, some of them are on other planets, but it should be done by the time you guys get back."

The remaining guys, including Hayward, had clearly heard that at least as well as Ethan had. Their jaws went taut, desperation chasing terror across their faces.

"I think," the woman suggested, with pointed mildness, "maybe you should get out of here before they figure out how to open those pods."

She was right. The people in the pods were stirring; and damn, there _were_ thousands of them. If whatever the girl on the other end of the comm had—downloaded into them, or whatever—happened to mention what Novina had been planning for them, then, yeah, that wasn't exactly a crowd of happy customers who weren't going to be wanting answers.

The woman backed away, gun still leveled. The squirrelly guy and another woman with a long blondish braid were already up the ramp and through the shuttle's rear hatch, and Ethan and Max were just inside it. The woman came up toward them without looking away, without the gun moving an inch—and then the ramp started to rise, the hatch closing, and the second her line of sight was cut she was turning around, gun away, moving briskly.

She was definitely in charge here, Ethan thought.

And she'd already seen what they were doing to Max, but she hadn't had a chance to really _look_ ; she did now, and she took it, which made Ethan's estimation of her rise even higher. She didn't touch any of the wounds, just looked Max over with her mouth tight and then said, "I should have shot more of them."

Ethan snorted.

"I think they got the message," Max offered, bloody mouth slanting.

The woman didn't look like she thought that counted for enough, which Ethan was ready to agree with. "We'll get you up to the ship," she said, "and the android'll take care of you. You'll be fine."

"Thanks," Max said.

Which was only polite, but for some reason it made the woman pause, that little furrow returning to her forehead. She looked at the two of them, how they were leaning into each other. Ethan had let his hand fall from Max's face when she'd come toward them, and now it was resting gently on Max's chest instead. And it was—it was his left, he had the ring on. She saw it, and then she checked Max's hand and saw his, too, and then her eyebrows went up.

"Blink us out, Wexler," she said, without looking away.

"Aye aye," muttered the squirrelly guy, and then _something_ happened, something that stretched them and squeezed them and popped them like soap bubbles. It hadn't made a sound, there was no sensation of real movement, but Ethan was suddenly sure the shuttle wasn't inside the facility anymore.

"Okay, well," Ethan said. "Thanks for the rescue and stuff, but—who the hell are you people, exactly?"

The woman stared. Ethan turned to check, and the other woman, with the braid, was staring too, but not as hard. The squirrelly guy, Wexler, twisted around in the pilot's chair, and said, "You've got to be kidding me. You guys lost your memories _again_?"

The shuttle was called the _Marauder_. The ship was called the _Raza_ , and it was waiting for them right above the facility, hovering there in the air, so it only took them about thirty seconds to dock the _Marauder_ to it, and then they were basically home free.

Ethan could feel it when the _Raza_ started to turn and then pick up speed. But he couldn't—he couldn't decide whether it was a familiar sensation, whether it was something he'd done before.

The dark-haired woman was called Two; not Tu, not Tuo. Two, the number, it was just also her name. Wexler, Ethan had already figured out, and the woman with the braid was apparently Tash.

Two led Ethan and Max straight to the ship's infirmary, mouth a hard line in her face, and Ethan almost wanted to apologize except he couldn't be sure what to apologize for.

There were more people in the infirmary waiting for them. An android, and a man with a ridiculously hot and thoroughly unreadable face; and a young woman with blue-green hair—girlish voice, Ethan guessed, and it was clear he'd guessed right the second she opened her mouth and said, "Three! Six! What happened?"

She hustled forward, reaching for Max. And then the woman, Two, said, "They don't remember."

"They don't—" The young woman went still, and then backed up a half-step. "They don't—?"

"No," Two said quickly. "They aren't Boone and Griffin—Varrick," which made no sense at all. "Not like that. They don't remember any of it."

"About two weeks ago," Ethan volunteered, when the silence had stretched a little too long. "Or a little more by now, I guess. We woke up, didn't know who we were or where. We found our IDs on the apartment console, went through all our stuff, figured it out." He paused. "Or," he amended weakly, "we—thought we'd figured it out."

"Oh," the young woman said, eyes round. "You think—" She looked at him and Max the same way Two had, visibly clocking how they were standing together, Ethan's arm under Max to hold him up and Ethan's hand, steadying, spread out over the muscle of Max's chest. The rings. "You think you're Ethan and Max Breyer-Stone."

"It would have been the logical conclusion," the android said from behind her, bland, "given the facts apparently in evidence."

"Well, fuck," the young woman said.

She swallowed, and looked at Two. And then, carefully, haltingly, she started to explain.

Ethan was—Three. Max was Six.

The young woman was Five, and she'd picked the names Ethan and Max on purpose: names that would sound like the ones they were used to, to give them a leg up, make it easier for them to answer to them, while they were—get this— _undercover_.

This had happened before. Not to Wexler or Tash; to the ones of them whose names were numbers. They'd come out of stasis on this ship, remembering nothing. They'd named themselves, because they'd needed something to call each other until they managed to find out who they were.

And then they'd found out who they were, and they'd hated it, and clung to the numbers for all they were worth instead.

Ethan could relate.

He and Max—he and _Six_ —weren't married. They never had been. They were friends, Five had been really quick to say that. Friends who'd maybe been a little bit on the outs, and Five maybe had developed their cover identities specifically hoping to force them to get their shit figured out and stop shouting at each other all the time.

She hadn't said it like that, of course. But Ethan—Three—could read between the lines just fine.

It was funny. All that time he'd spent thinking about how great Ethan Breyer-Stone's life was, how lucky he'd been; all that time he'd spent wishing he could remember the rest of his time with Max, how they'd met, how they'd gotten married. And now it turned out he'd been racking his brain for all the wrong things. No _wonder_ he hadn't been able to dig any of that shit up, huh? It had never been in his head in the first place.

Funny, yeah. Except he couldn't really figure out how to laugh at it.

The alien invasion was real. Apparently, if he'd had his memories, he'd have known that. To Ethan and Max, living on-planet, thinking their whole lives had been built there, the other side of the galaxy had seemed pretty fucking far away; but the _Raza_ had been there, had seen the vast black ships cross over from another dimension entirely.

And there _was_ a corporate conspiracy. The people in the pods had been synthetics, artificially constructed. Technically illegal, but since when had that mattered to corporations? It was just that Max hadn't been investigating it from the inside. He and Ethan—and Three—had gone in on purpose, trying to find out where Novina was making synthetics, which was the central facility that housed them, where the control hub was that was uplinked to the ones that were already active.

That sweaty panicking corporate honcho had had it half right: the aliens did want synthetics. They made good hosts. But the aliens definitely were _not_ going to leave regular humans alone if they just got handed enough meatsuits to put on.

The _Raza_ had been checking in intermittently, hence the comms. 602-3, 602-6: Three's, and Six's, because back when they'd first found the set and split it up among the crew, Five had wanted 602-5, and it had spiraled from there. They'd been supposed to get in touch before they made a move—so the crew could _bring them_ their guns, since there was no easy way to get them past the security on Max and Ethan Breyer-Stone's high-falutin' apartment building.

But then they couldn't get a hold of either of them. They couldn't get a hold of either of them, hadn't been able to detect them in the apartment with scanners; had, in desperation, tried to track their comm signals, so good thing Ethan had thought to shove those comms in his pocket before he'd left. Once they'd realized they had the right facility after all, they'd ridden to the rescue _and_ done what they'd always been planning to do for the synthetics Novina had packed up in storage. Win-win.

"We figure they must have made a deal," Five said. "Some kind of secret merger with Dwarf Star, or just a contract off the books. Dwarf Star put a lot of work into this, they weren't going to leave it all resting on a single synthetic production facility. They had to have—diversified, I guess you could call it."

"Expanded their portfolio," Max murmured wryly.

The android had almost finished fixing him up, by then; Ethan had parked himself on the edge of the infirmary bed, hip pressed to Max's thigh, because he still _felt_ married, goddammit.

"And they—wiped you?" Five said uncertainly.

Ethan looked at Max, and then away, and rubbed a hand over his face. "Yeah," he said at last. "They, uh. The guy who did it said they were using some kind of prototype device they'd been working on in R&D or whatever. He was only trying to access Max's memory, see if he could find out how far Max's investigation had gotten. But he fatfingered it—deleted everything instead. They'd sedated me, but apparently I woke up anyway partway through, so they wiped me too. So I couldn't tell Max they'd been there, who they were, whatever." He paused for a second. "They said Max was GA?"

"Oh," Five said. "Ex-GA! Ex-GA. But yeah. Six," and oops, he'd forgotten; he just couldn't help but call Max _Max_ , dammit, "he was, um. He was undercover with us, too, actually. We didn't know he was GA for a while. He didn't either. And then he found out, and he went back to them. But then he left," she added hurriedly, like she thought that would piss Ethan off for some reason. "He's not working for them anymore."

"Huh," Ethan said. At least Maximilian Breyer-Stone hadn't been lying to Ethan Breyer-Stone about that, he thought wryly.

Five smiled at him uncertainly, reached out and touched his shoulder. "The good news is," she said, "we can fix that. Well, kind of."

Ethan glanced at Max, who was already looking back. "Kind of," Max repeated.

"We learned that we can take imprints of ourselves," Five said. "Or, well, the ship can. We can make them, save them, archive them. And we can—reintegrate them, if we want to."

"And we took some of ourselves before we left," Ethan guessed, because he thought he could kind of tell where this was going.

"Yeah," Five said. "Just in case anything happened to either of you. We weren't expecting _this_ , obviously, but."

"So we can remember everything up to the moment the imprint was taken," Max said. "But nothing after that?"

"Yeah," Five conceded. "Whatever happened while you were undercover—I don't think we can do anything about that. Two weeks ago was about three weeks after you got there. We didn't have the chance to get another imprint of you once you were in, it would have been too risky to try."

"But it won't overwrite what we do remember?" Ethan said.

"No, no, you can keep that! There'll be a gap, that's all."

Ethan swallowed. Shit, what a weird fucking decision to have to make. Two weeks, two really really good weeks; two weeks of amazing sex with a little mystery adventure on the side that hadn't seemed like that big a deal, two weeks with the guy he'd thought he'd married. Two weeks with the guy he'd thought he'd—

But it hadn't been a little mystery adventure. It had almost gotten Max killed. And it was—it was Three, he thought slowly, who'd been able to do something about that. Three was the one who'd owned guns, who knew how to use them, because this crew ran into trouble all the time; Three was the one who could slam somebody's head into concrete and steal their gun and shoot the rest of their guard friends in the back without blinking.

Three was the one who'd shot at the guy who'd hit Max in the face, and hadn't missed.

Three wasn't some layabout house husband who spent his days riding suborbital transit for fun, whose most important problem was whether or not to wear his fucking wedding ring in front of his husband.

And this, here on the _Raza_ —this was Three's life. If Ethan was going to be ready for it, he probably kind of needed to be Three.

He bit his mouth, and looked at Max.

"Could we have a minute?" Max said.

"Of course," Five said instantly.

Two was already gone; she'd left after about five minutes, probably not that interested in hearing stuff she already knew explained to two people who shouldn't have been strangers. And the guy, Four—or at least Five had called him that while she was explaining, hooking her thumb over her shoulder at him, though now that Ethan thought about it nobody had actually addressed him that way to his face—anyway, he'd followed, totally impassive.

The android didn't seem to understand that Max's not-really-a-question had applied to her, too. But Five got it, and drew her out into the corridor, and then the infirmary door closed behind them.

"So," Max said quietly.

"Yeah," Ethan said.

Max looked a lot better now: all cleaned up, no blood coming out of his face from anywhere, though one of his eyes was still bruised and swollen, and the splits in his skin, his lips, still looked painful as hell. The worst of the burns had been smoothed away, some kind of dermal therapy technique the android had gotten real good at, but Ethan could still tell where they'd been.

He touched one spot with two fingertips. Max made a low sound, and tugged him closer; Ethan squeezed his eyes shut, leaned in and kissed him. He wanted to. He wanted to, and who knew whether he'd be able to, once he was Three again? Whether Max—whether Six would let him, once they remembered each other for real.

Ethan was careful. He didn't want to hurt Max. He kept the kiss slow, and light, and gentle. But he wanted it. He wanted the memory, clear and sharp and as detailed as he could make it, while he still had the chance to give it to himself.

And then Max eased away, just barely, and reached up to the nape of Ethan's neck, drew his head down at a slightly different angle so their foreheads were touching instead. "It isn't going to change anything for me," he said, quiet but so firm it almost sounded true.

"You can't know that," Ethan said hoarsely.

"Yes, I can," Max said, because he was a stubborn son of a bitch. "You heard her. Reintegrating these imprints of ours isn't going to overwrite anything. We'll still remember the last two weeks. And that means no matter what else we remember, it isn't going to change anything for me."

"Three and Six aren't married," Ethan said. "They weren't even fucking. Three's probably an asshole—"

"We'll figure it out," Max said, gentle, uncompromising. "Come on," and he tilted his head, kissed Ethan again, firm and sweet and punctuational. "Let's go get ourselves back."

"Okay," Ethan said.

* * *

* * *

Once it was over, Three left without saying a word to the android, locked himself in his quarters for two days, and got very, very drunk.

Somebody came by his quarters a couple times, tried the door. That was probably Two. Five came around and didn't try, which was nice of her because she definitely could've cracked it; she just talked to him through the door instead, said quiet comforting things he tried really hard not to listen to and then mercifully left him alone again.

And sometimes there was someone else, someone with even measured footsteps, who walked up to his quarters but didn't do anything. Didn't do anything, didn't say anything. Just stood out there, silent, until Three's throat was so tight he couldn't fucking breathe—and then left.

Three was pretty sure he knew who that was, too.

But he couldn't wallow forever. He didn't want to. He wanted to drown his brain in booze and feel sorry for himself, for the gigantic ridiculous mess he'd made of a life he frankly hadn't been handling that well even before all this. And then he wanted to never ever speak of it again, pretend it hadn't happened at all, and also quite possibly avoid Six for the rest of his life.

The worst thing about it, he thought distantly, was that he'd been so fucking _whipped_. He'd have done anything for Six—for Max. He'd fucked Six. He'd let Six fuck _him_ , let Six hold him down in that giant fucking bed and push his thighs apart and shove his _dick_ in him; just remembering it kind of made him want to die. He'd been so easy, so earnest, so fucking desperate. Full of stupid hapless tender feelings, like a nervous fucking virgin. Which was practically what he had been, really, considering at the time he hadn't been able to remember ever having had sex before.

Ethan, that goddamn idiot, had thought it _meant_ something. Had thought all of it meant something, from the way Max touched him to those stupid fucking rings, which Three now knew perfectly well had just been props Five had turned up somewhere. She'd been brisk and straightforward about it, when she'd made them take them, which had only made Three more sure she was cackling about it on the inside. Damn kid.

But never mind. The point was, he'd done his wallowing, and now he was going to move on to Step 2: never speak of it, never think of it, act like it had never happened. Piece of cake.

He left his quarters, showed up for what turned out to be one of their good old informal crew meetings in the mess, and acted for all he was worth like he'd just been getting drunk in his room for fun, like it was no big deal. Wexler was totally smirking, and Five kept darting him uncertain concerned glances; but Tash didn't give a shit, and Ryo and Two made it easy to pretend everything was fine just because they basically never made anything but serious faces anyway.

If Six did anything weird, he did it silently. Three didn't look at him to check.

The meeting was ostensibly about their next move. Taking Novina's synthetic operation out had been their big play, the best way they'd been able to think of to slow the aliens down a little—because Three remembered it all now. They'd been able to close the rift, with a whole lot of fucking around, but—

But not until they'd gotten Six back from the other side of it. Five had refused to do otherwise. So had Two, once they'd gotten that fucking alien blob out of her.

Three hadn't been there for the first argument about it. He'd still been stuck trying to get the hell away from Portia and make it back to the ship. Obviously he had plenty of evidence as to how literal it wasn't: but it _felt_ carved into his brain anyway, the moment he'd finally returned to the _Raza_ on the other _Marauder_ , the moment Two and Five had had to tell him what Six had done—

Not that that mattered right now. Because it didn't.

Anyway, there were still a pile of ships that had made it through, and they weren't exactly turning tail and running. The blink drive had been fried, but not irreparably, and they were getting real good at installing it and uninstalling it, moving it from the _Raza_ to the _Marauder_ and back again, wherever they needed it the most. For the moment, they were just blinking around, the android randomizing coordinates, so the aliens couldn't find them, couldn't track them down. But that probably wasn't going to work forever.

Three nodded his way through the conversation with half an ear, and didn't say a word. They'd figure something out. They always did.

The second Two started winding down at last, saying she was going to think everything over, he was out of there. The longer he stuck around, the greater the chance that the kid would've found some way to badger everybody else into leaving the mess hall and then locked him in there with Six, and that was the last thing he wanted.

It was fine. He'd just never look at or speak to Six again, and everything would be fine.

That worked, for about four days.

He was never in a room alone with Six, or even a corridor. He sometimes turned his face in Six's general direction, and he even managed not to flinch when he did it.

Six had a lot to say to him. Three didn't doubt it. Six kept turning toward him, kept _looking_ at him with those steady searching eyes; it didn't matter that Three wasn't looking back, he could fucking feel it anyway.

But whatever it was, Six didn't seem to want to say it in front of anybody else, which meant Three could keep using whoever was closest as a shield. He started hanging around the android on purpose, because she was the least likely to ask him what the hell he was doing, or tell him he needed to get a grip and go talk to Six.

It wasn't like he actually needed to hear whatever Six had bottled up in there. He could guess most of it, he figured, and the rest he didn't _want_ to hear. It was over, done. Six just needed to drop it and move on, like Three had. That was his problem: he never knew when to just let anything go. He was never willing to settle, to let things slide, to not go at them head-on with everything he had.

He'd done it with the GA, deciding he was GA and that he had to do everything the way the GA would, no compromises. And then he'd done it with them, like flipping a switch, finished with the GA forever, throwing himself full steam into fighting the corporations, organizing the independent colonies, revolution.

He'd even done it with that fucking rift. And look how that had turned out. You'd think he'd have learned by now.

Three just had to make it clear to him that it wasn't going to get him anywhere this time. After that, he'd fuck off and leave Three alone.

Yeah.

Six almost got him, once.

It was in the mess. Three just needed a fucking coffee, and when he went in, it was safe—Six was there, staring into a mug like the secrets of the universe were at the bottom, and Three tried not to think about the way his head came up, the way he saw Three and drew a slow breath. Because Ryo was there, too, putting away a couple clean plates, and no way was Six going to start anything in front of Ryo. Most of the crew was still treating him like unexploded ordnance; none of them let him see anything personal, because none of them trusted him when he still wasn't Four.

So: safe. Three ducked in, grabbed himself a mug without looking at it and made a beeline for the coffee. He could take it black and get out of there—but he didn't really want to, and he was so fucking tired, rubbing a hand against his forehead and sorting through the coffee flavoring packets, that he fucked up and didn't notice when Ryo walked out.

He'd picked a packet, ripped it open and started pouring, when he heard Six say, "Three, _please_ ," from way closer than he'd thought Six was to him, and the rest of the flavoring compound went all over the counter as he jerked and whirled around.

Six was standing there with his hands up, palm-out, and such an earnest determined expression that Three wanted to punch him in the nose. Because—because Three had accidentally looked at his face, and abruptly the breath was knocked out of him: he still had the picture in his head of the way Six had looked the last time Three'd seen him, all cut up and fucked up where the Novina suits had been beating him and torching him.

But it had been a week already, and Six was almost okay now. His eye was still messed up, the skin around it discolored, but it wasn't half as swollen as it had been, and most of the cuts on his face were scabbed over or gone entirely. The biggest split in his lip was still obvious, and Three had a sudden inexorable sense memory of—of kissing him, that last time, so goddamn carefully—

His gut lurched; his face went hot and then cold, and he had to swallow down a bitter ragged laugh he didn't want to let out where Six was going to hear it. Fucking Ethan, who'd wanted that memory, who'd taken such pains to fix every detail in his mind, the dumb shit. He wasn't the one who had to live with having done it.

"Three," Six said again, low. "We have to talk about this. We _have_ to. I know you don't want to—"

"Understatement," Three bit out, turning away, grabbing for his coffee. "No fucking thank you."

"Three—"

" _Don't_ ," Three spat, before Six could actually touch his arm, and Six flinched and yanked his hand back, and then controlled himself with a visible effort.

"We already needed to, before any of this even happened. There was a reason Five did what she did. You know that as well as I do."

"Yeah, well, didn't work, did it?"

"It might have," Six said, which was so fucking stupid Three couldn't help but stare at him incredulously. "We don't know."

And—oh. He meant—he meant those three weeks they couldn't remember, those three weeks they'd never remember.

Because there wouldn't have been any way for Three to avoid him. Not then. They had to have talked about it; and yeah, for all they knew they'd talked it through until they were hoarse. That first morning, Three recalled involuntarily. They'd woken up in bed together, which meant they'd _gone_ to bed together. Six had been shirtless. They hadn't been naked or anything, so presumably they hadn't fucked. At least not that night. But they hadn't strangled each other. They'd agreed to get into that bed and lie there, close enough to touch, and they'd fallen asleep next to each other.

It wasn't much to go on. But it wasn't nothing.

Three realized abruptly that he'd been standing there saying nothing, staring helplessly at Six, for about ten seconds too long.

His throat closed. He couldn't think. He couldn't breathe. He clutched his coffee and shoved blindly past Six, and he fucking ran, until he was sure nobody was following him: until the only thing he could hear was the clang of his own boots against the grating of the deck, the rush and throb of his own heart.

* * *

There _was_ a reason why Five had done what she'd done.

Three had gotten away from Portia, had made it back to the ship in the other _Marauder_. He'd been so fucking pleased with himself for it—two shuttles, and the second one was even FTL-capable. That was bound to come in handy in no time.

He hadn't known what Six had done. And then they'd told him.

Five had been convinced Six was alive. The explosion hadn't done what they'd thought it would, after all, opening that rift. So maybe it hadn't destroyed the _Marauder_ , either.

Which Three had been willing to acknowledge was possible, and had turned out to be true in the end.

But as far as he was concerned, it had also been completely missing the point.

They'd managed to get a signal to Six, on the other side. He'd made it back through the rift in the regular _Marauder_ , and the alien ships hadn't blown him out of the sky while he did it, and they'd figured out how to close the rift so no more aliens could come through—if there even were more of them, but whatever, it was better to have the damn thing shut down than not.

Six had made it back. Five had been thrilled, relieved, had thrown herself at him and hugged him. Two had been just as effusive, at least for Two: she'd smiled wide, clapped him on the back and told him how glad she was that he was all right. Wexler and Tash hadn't exactly been throwing him a party, but whatever, they were assholes. Even if Wexler was kind of funny.

Three hadn't said a word to him. Three had wanted to fucking strangle him.

Because it didn't matter that the explosion hadn't killed him, not when he'd thought it would.

He'd thought it would, and he'd _done it anyway_. He'd gone out there to blow himself up on purpose, and he'd had no idea that it wasn't going to happen; he got no credit whatsoever for managing not to die, because it had been despite his own best goddamn efforts.

It had taken a while for anyone to notice how pissed Three had been, which had been adding insult to injury. Five had been baffled, baffled and then frustrated, that he refused to be glad Six was okay. Six had figured it out and then borne it stoically, which had just pissed Three off even worse. Two had given him a lot of steady looks, just to let him know she knew, and that the reason she wasn't saying anything was because she figured he was too stupid to listen, not because he was handling it well.

So, yeah, Five had had a reason. Five had done the undercover-mission-to-save-the-galaxy equivalent of locking them in a room together until they got their shit straight and started playing nice again.

He remembered being aware of that. He was pretty sure that was exactly what he'd been thinking about when they'd gone to the android to get their imprints taken before they left: how fucking annoyed he was, how hellish this was going to be; having to pretend to be married to _Six_ , ugh, when all he wanted to do was—

Well. Was scream in the guy's face for an hour or two about what he'd been thinking, doing a dumbass thing like maybe killing himself, just to save this crapsack of a universe.

As if there was anything left in it that was worth saving, at that kind of cost. How could there be?

He didn't want to think about it now. He couldn't stand to. So he poured a gallon or so of whisky into that coffee, and drank until he couldn't really think at all.

That was the beginning of the end.

He could tell by the way he woke up, hungover, to somebody—Six—pounding on his door, saying his name.

"Urgh," he managed.

The pounding quieted, which was great, because every individual bang had set off an echoing throb through his head, down his spine. "Three? Are you all right?"

"Was asleep, asshole."

Six was briefly silent.

"Don't suppose you'll let me in if I ask," he said, after a moment.

Three didn't dignify that with an answer. He just lay there for a second, eyes still closed; and then he made himself roll over halfway, pushed himself up about two inches and squinted around.

There was what was left of the whisky-coffee—not much, the barest puddle pooling in the mug. Which was good, because it was on its side on the floor, right below where his head had been hanging halfway off the edge of his bed. Didn't look—or smell—like he'd spilled it, though, which was good. Nothing made a hangover worse like having to clean up after yourself.

The door beeped. Three blinked, rolled back over, and stared at it in betrayal as it cycled open.

Six stood there just past it, framed perfectly for a second. And then he twiddled his fingers in a sardonic little wave, and said, "I told Five I was done letting you weasel out of this conversation. She explained what I needed to do."

Three sighed, and let himself fall back onto the bed again. "Backstabbing little buttinsky," he muttered at the ceiling.

Six came in, and the door cycled shut again behind him. "Don't be angry with her. Be angry with me."

"Oh, I _am_ , trust me," Three assured him, falsely bright. He pushed himself up, climbed off the bed and only swayed a little, and ignored the suddenly increased throb of his headache at the motion. "You're probably pretty pissed at me too, huh?"

"You haven't exactly been making this easy," Six agreed, with that forced calm Three really loathed.

Three snorted. "Yeah? Bet you're really missing Ethan now, aren't you?"

Six blinked, and didn't answer; something had changed in his face, something Three couldn't quite pinpoint.

"He'd have made it easy for you," Three pressed. "You had that moron wrapped around your little finger. Too bad you're stuck with me now."

"Three," Six said slowly.

"Just like I'm stuck with you." Three offered him a smile that dripped with sympathy. "Max—now _there_ was a guy you could trust. Couldn't lie to me about being in the GA, because he didn't even know it himself. Wasn't about to charge off and blow himself to hell. Nice steady job, decent apartment, good fuck. Why, the most he managed was to get himself abducted and punched in the face a few times. That's nothing, compared to what you've got up your sleeve—"

"Three—"

"Save it, okay?" Three spat, savage. "I don't want to hear it. I don't need to hear it."

"Hear what?" Six said, like it wasn't ludicrously obvious.

"Whatever the hell it is you want to say to me," Three said, instead of the real answer. "Just fuck off."

He threw himself back down onto his bed, covered his face with his hands. His eyes were hot and prickling, and his head hurt, and he was so goddamn tired. He was so goddamn tired of feeling like this.

But he didn't hear footsteps, and he didn't hear the door opening again.

"The thing is," Six said, "I'm kind of getting the impression you do need to hear it."

"I really don't," Three told the ceiling. "It's not like it's a surprise," and then, helpless, cracked open too far to stop it, he listened to himself say, "You always do this."

"I always do what?"

"Leave," Three said, and it felt like it fucking tore his throat open on the way out. "You're always fucking—always. Every goddamn time. You take every out you can get. You're stubborn about every stupid thing in the galaxy, about turning us in, about fucking off the second you think anybody needs you, about saving all of fucking humanity by vaporizing yourself. The only thing you _can't_ bring yourself to be stubborn about is fucking sticking around for five goddamn minutes."

Six was quiet for a moment.

"I didn't vaporize myself," he said at last, mild.

"You _didn't know you wouldn't when you did it_ ," Three practically shouted at him, and fuck, that was too much. All of this was too much. He needed to get out of here, he couldn't—he didn't want to—

He rolled up off the bed, tried to stumble away; but Six was a lot closer than Three had realized, and Six caught him, steadied him, broad warm hands closing around his arms.

"Three," Six said, soft, close, right the fuck in Three's fucking ear. "I told you nothing was going to change for me when we reintegrated our imprints."

"Yeah," Three said, and laughed, ragged and furious. "Good thing I wasn't stupid enough to hold you to it, huh?"

"No," Six said, nonsensical. "I meant it," which was even more ridiculous, and Three was about to tell him so except he couldn't, because Six was kissing him.

He didn't understand what the hell Six thought he was doing, but he'd spent two weeks solid kissing Max pretty much every time they were within two feet of each other. He swayed into Six, made a helpless stupid sound in his throat, pushed his arms against Six's hands so he could reach through them and grip Six by the shoulder, the nape of the neck; and Six let him, slid them to the outsides of his shoulders and then his waist, and kept kissing him.

Three tore himself away. "What the fuck," he said unsteadily.

"I wasn't leaving you," Six said. "I wasn't ever trying to leave _you_. I don't miss Ethan. How could I? He didn't know me. He didn't know anything about me—who I am, what I've done. The mistakes I've made, the things I've done wrong, the ways I've tried to make it right again. Sure, he liked me." Six stopped, and shook his head. "But how much could that ever mean, when he didn't have any reason not to?"

"You prefer me to him," Three said slowly, "because I think you're a self-righteous asshole? You realize that doesn't make any sense."

Six's mouth pursed; but it was slanting, too, at one corner. "No," he said. "You _know_ me. You know me, you know yourself, and you still—" He paused, hesitated, like he didn't want to leap to conclusions, didn't want to put words in Three's mouth; Three almost, dimly, wished that he would, because there was no way in hell _Three_ was ever going to be able to say it. "I can't miss him," Six repeated instead. "He was you in half the ways that matter, and the rest of the points are all in your favor. I guess," Six allowed after a second, "he didn't want to punch me in the teeth as often."

"Yeah, well, he'd only known you for a couple weeks," Three said automatically. "He'd have gotten there sooner or later."

Six grinned, flexed his hands where they were still resting at Three's waist: a warning, before he kissed Three again. Three thought about shoving him off, but he waited a little too long to actually do it. And fuck, Six's mouth was just as good as he remembered. He could—he almost got it despite himself, almost understood what Six was trying to say. It wasn't less than it had been with Max, Six's parted lips, Six's tongue, the way Six touched him. It was more. It couldn't help but be more, because it was Six. Kissing Max had been easy, risk-free, simple. It hadn't felt that way to Ethan at the time, but that was just because Ethan had had no idea what he was doing, had had about three things in his small straightforward world to worry about and two of those things had been Max. But kissing Six—

Kissing Six was serious. Kissing Six was fucking dangerous. Two weeks with Max and Ethan had been halfway in love, but if they'd fought, fucked up, decided to break it off and try to figure themselves out, he'd have lived through it. He'd have had a whole world in front of him, a whole universe, and no idea what he was leaving behind him. But Six—fuck, Six could rip Three's heart out of his chest without even trying. He already fucking had, trying to blow himself up, and there was absolutely no way to be sure he wasn't going to do it again. Three had distrusted him, hated him, been furious with him; been baffled by him, and hurt by him, and still fucking respected him even if he was never going to say so where Six could hear it. Six _knew_ him, and Ethan could never have had any idea how terrifying that thought could be. Six could fucking wreck him—even if Three shoved him away now, even if they never kissed or dicked each other again.

Even the kissing itself was different. Ethan hadn't had anything to hold back, not with the man he thought was his husband, and they'd known each other two weeks; it had felt intense with nothing else to compare it to, but it was like a kiddie wading pool compared to how tangled up Three had managed to get over Six with literally years to do it in. Three was clutching Six way too hard, and he knew it, and he still couldn't stop—tongue in Six's mouth, eyes squeezed shut tight so he could tell himself that was why they were pricking at the corners, breath shuddering through him, frantic noises trapped in his tight throat as he tried to swallow them down.

And he'd have freaked out about that a lot more, except Six was kissing him back just as hard, just as deeply. Leaning into him, hands gripping Three like he wasn't planning to let Three slip away again. Like somehow, maybe, he'd decided this was one of those things that mattered enough to be stubborn about.

Six drew it out—slowed the pace, less fraught, less frantic, less desperate. Made it slow, smooth and lingering, like he wasn't going anywhere. He broke away, panted for a second against Three's cheek, and then kissed Three again like he couldn't help it, couldn't stop himself. "It didn't change anything for me," he murmured again, against the corner of Three's mouth. "I'd only known _you_ for a couple of weeks, and I was still—I was—" He stopped, backed off the barest inch: just far enough to meet Three's eyes, gaze flicking back and forth over Three's face. "So, yeah, I remember more now. I know you better. That means I feel _more_ things about you, not less." He stopped again. "I liked it, Three. I must've liked it before, too. Being married to you, getting to touch you all the time, you letting me."

"Oh, bullshit," Three managed, because the other option was to believe it, and he didn't know what the hell that might do to him.

And Six looked at him searchingly and then kissed him some more, which was—he definitely couldn't walk away with the impression that he could win all their arguments like this, Three thought hazily, but it wouldn't hurt anything to let him keep trying it for a while.

"You're still sleeping on the couch," he said, when Six finally eased away.

Six smiled at him; and then he lifted a hand to Three's face and the smile slid away, his expression grave and sweet as he swept a thumb along the line of Three's mouth. "Okay," he said, very low. "But you're not getting rid of me that easy."

"You stubborn fucking asshole," Three told him, breathless with relief, and dragged him down to kiss him first, this time.


End file.
